MRC Epidemiology UnitSenior Research Associate
Diet and Physical Activity Interventions in Patient Populations, Nutrition Measurement Platform
Current work and interests
Kirsten Rennie is a Senior Research Associate leading the development of research on physical activity and diet in patient populations for the Measurement Platform and the development of physical activity measurement for the Diet and Physical Activity Interventions in Patient Populations programme.
This work includes the development and evaluation of lifestyle interventions in different patient groups. Her work focuses on the incorporation of telehealth in studies, particularly quantitative measures of free-living physical activity and diet and how these can be used to assess the impact of interventions or improve clinical care pathways. Kirsten is also interested in how remote monitoring can be used to identify individuals who are at risk of adverse health outcomes.
Kirsten contributes to the supervision of Masters and PhD students.
Background and experience
Kirsten has worked as an epidemiologist in both academic and industry settings, including MRC Human Nutrition Research, Oxon epidemiology, UBC, Unilever, University College London and University of Ulster. Her previous work has included the development of objective measurements of physical activity into large-scale studies such as wave form accelerometry and heart rate monitoring. This involved applying these measurements in observational studies of metabolic diseases with other measures of physical activity and dietary behaviour. Kirsten has also evaluated lifestyle interventions in weight management programmes and worked on pharmaco-epidemiology safety and effectiveness studies in large-scale patient studies.
Kirsten received a MA in Biological Anthropology (1995), MPhil in Epidemiology (1997) and PhD in physical activity epidemiology (2000) from the University of Cambridge. She is a UK registered nutritionist (Association for Nutrition, Public Health specialty) and an Honorary Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She holds an honorary research contract with Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and a Public Health Academic Contract with the Department of Health and Social Care.
Current studies
CREATE-C study tests a remote activity programme tailored for patients with colorectal cancer delivered completely at home and to investigate whether this intervention helps patients during treatment.
WARD-W study assesses the acceptability of a wrist-worn accelerometer to objectively measure physical activity in end-stage renal disease patients at home and whether it could be used to better characterise frailty risk as part of the frailty assessment in patients from the low clearance and dialysis clinic.
COBALT is a randomised, open-labelled, interventional feasibility study of a proposed multicentre randomised controlled trial.
Within this study we are assessing the use and acceptability of a wrist-worn accelerometer to objectively measure physical activity in kidney transplant patients at home and whether it could be used to better characterise changes in activity levels and associated quality of life after a surgical intervention.
Fenland COVID-19 study in a population-based study conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, using telehealth monitoring of symptoms, biomarkers, health behaviours and using a novel remote blood collection method.
CAVA study assesses if dried blood spots, collected either by a finger prick blood test or by the novel OneDraw device, provide the same antibody test result for COVID-19 as venepuncture.