Chris Sainsbury is a Consultant Physician in Endocrinology and Diabetes at Gartnavel General Hospital, Glasgow, where he has practised within NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde for over 18 years. He holds honorary academic appointments as Clinical Reader at the University of Dundee and Senior Lecturer Fellow at the University of Glasgow, and serves as Clinical AI Lead at MyWay Digital Health, a University of Dundee spin-out focused on diabetes management.
He has an MD from the University of Glasgow, and fellowships of the Royal College of Physicians of Glasgow and the British Computer Society. He is a former CSO Innovation Fellow and current NRS Senior Research Fellow.
His research focuses on developing machine learning and foundation models for electronic health record data, with applications in cardiovascular risk prediction and diabetes. He is the developer of ASCENDgpt, a phenotype-aware transformer model for cardiovascular risk prediction, pretrained on EHR datasets from the UK and US, and which generates potential future outcomes allowing counterfactual predictions in the context of alternative therapeutic choices. Unlike many clinician-researchers, he is a hands-on coder and works directly with model architectures, tokenisation frameworks, and training pipelines.
He has contributed to grant-funded research totalling approximately £8.3 million, with around £860,000 as co-PI, spanning funders including NIHR, EPSRC, InnovateUK, MRC, and AstraZeneca. His current work includes the PRESIDE project on SGLT2-inhibitor treatment escalation and precision medicine initiatives combining EHR transformers with retinal imaging networks. He has published in journals including Diabetologia, Diabetes Care, BMJ, and iScience.
He maintains active collaborations with researchers at the Universities of Strathclyde, Dundee, Edinburgh, Oxford, Birmingham, and University College London, and has given invited talks at Diabetes UK Professional Conference and the Primary Care Diabetes Society.
