Dr Tim Wilkinson

Senior Clinical Research Fellow & Consultant Neurologist

Biography

Background

I am a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Row Fogo Centre for Research into Ageing and the Brain, University of Edinburgh, and a Consultant Neurologist with NHS Fife and Honorary Consultant Neurologist with NHS Lothian.

I studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and completed my neurology training in South East Scotland. During training, I was awarded an MRC Clinical Research Training Fellowship to undertake a PhD (thesis title: “Predicting dementia: insights from routinely collected healthcare data").

During my training I developed a subspecialty interest in cognitive neurology, and undertook a post-CCT fellowship in Cognitive Neurology & Movement Disorders at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr Mario Masellis and Professor Sandra Black (2022–2023). I returned to Edinburgh in 2023 to take up a joint academic and clinical post, and became a substantive consultant neurologist in NHS Fife in 2024, where I run cognitive, movement disorder, and general neurology clinics.

In 2025, I was awarded an NHS Research Scotland Career Researcher Fellowship and a UK Dementia Trials Network Clinical Trials Fellowship to support my research into vascular cognitive impairment, neurodegenerative diseases, and early-phase dementia trials.

Qualifications

  • 2025: Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
  • 2020: PhD Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh
  • 2019: PGDip Epidemiology, LSHTM
  • 2013: MRCP (Edin), Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
  • 2013: MSc Translational Medicine, University of Edinburgh
  • 2010: MBChB (Hons), University of Edinburgh
  • 2007: BMedSci(Hons), University of Edinburgh

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Current PhD students supervised

Maija Pyykkönen - PhD

Research summary

My research centres around three main themes:

1. Clinical trials in cognitive disorders and dementia, particularly vascular cognitive impairment.

2. Mixed dementias, in particular how vascular and Alzheimer's disease pathologies interact to contribute to cognitive impairment.

2. The use of routinely-collected health datasets, cohort studies and patient registries to study dementia risk factors and prognosis.

I developed and validated algorithms to identify dementia cases from primary care, hospital admissions and mortality data within UK Biobank and co-created the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage Databank Dementia electronic Cohort (SAIL-DeC), a research-ready cohort comprised of routinely-collected health data for the population of Wales, UK.

 

Publications

PURE is not currently updating fully, so an up to date list of publications is available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tim-Wilkinson-5 

Current research interests

1. Early phase clinical trials in neurodegenerative diseases. 2. Clinical trials of repurposed drugs for vascular cognitive impairment (LACI-Cog-1) 3. Understanding the prognosis of vascular cognitive impairment and the interplay between Alzheimer's disease and vascular pathologies in determining prognosis.

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