His work seeks to elucidate the mechanisms for prevention of disability due to stroke and dementia through the design, delivery and analysis of epidemiological studies and clinical trials. Of particular interest are: the contribution of vascular risk factors to dementia; the very long term follow-up of randomized trials; clinical diagnosis; and the better use of large electronic health record datasets for more efficient clinical trials and cohort studies, with the use of natural language, image processing and other models.

He founded the Edinburgh Clinical Natural Language Processing Group with Dr Honghang Wu and Dr Bea Alex, a multidisciplinary team at the University of Edinburgh who apply natural language processing to clinical text.