Frank Sullivan has been an academic GP since 1984. His PhD in Health Services Research in 1991 was awarded by the University of Glasgow where he worked as a lecturer and senior lecturer. During this early phase of his career, he also had a secondment to work in the Republic of Seychelles on the epidemiology of diabetes. From March 1998 until February 2014, he was the NHS Tayside professor of R&D in General Practice and Primary Care in Dundee. In that role, he served as the Director of the Health Informatics Centre and the clinical director of the Scottish School of Primary Care (SSPC) and Primary Care Research Network (SPCRN). From 2014-17 he was the inaugural Gordon F. Cheesborough Research Chair at North York General Hospital and director of the University of Toronto’s Practice Based Research Network: UTOPIAN. He is a trustee of the RS MacDonald Charitable Trust and chairs their research panel. He holds honorary chairs in the Universities of Dundee, Galway, and Toronto. Until recently, his clinical practice was in Anstruther.
He has been the Professor of Primary Care Medicine at the University of St. Andrews since 2017. His research interests lie mainly in health informatics and community-based trials, covering the spectrum from systematic reviews, record-linkage of electronic health records to decision support and the evaluation of complex interventions. He has published over 350 papers, notably in the early detection of cancer, the management of diabetes and Bell’s palsy. He won the British Medical Association Research Paper of the Year in 2009 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2011.