Christian Cole is a Senior Lecturer in Health Informatics and leads the research team in the Health Informatics Centre (HIC). His research interests are in developing tools and infrastructure to advance data analysis capabilities within Trusted Research Environments (TREs) where healthcare data are securely held. He is also interested in making AI/ML more directly clinically relevant by using real-world datasets to better model the diversity of data.

Chris is Director of the Alleviate Advanced Pain Discovery Platform. It is one of nine HDR UK funded national data hub specialising pain and chronic pain. The aim of Alleviate is to make UK pain data more accessible and securely sharable to accelerate research.

He has held previous roles as a Principle Investigator in Data Science at the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science and lead of the Data Analysis Group in the School of Life Science at the University of Dundee.

His expertise is in Bioinformatics and Data Science gained over his postdoctoral career at UMIST, The University of Manchester and, most recently, within the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee. In that time, Chris was the founder member and latterly the co-ordinator of the Data Analysis Group; a team dedicated to collaboration on biological projects requiring computational and statistical direction. At LRCFS Chris introduced data science principles and open and reproducible science. In particular around large-scale collaborative projects to collect ground truth datasets. He led projects on machine learning of ignitable liquids, footwear marks and DNA profile analysis. He also applied bioinformatics tools on new forensic DNA methods. Chris has a BSc in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry.