80+  PhD opportunities

DRIVE-Health has been awarded £7.9 million from The Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for student intake from 2024 onwards. DRIVE-Health is one of 65 CDTs which received funding, totalling more than £1 billion. Using seed funding from King’s Centre for Doctoral Studies awarded in 2020, DRIVE-Health has trained 30 students to date. Building on this, the new award will support five additional cohorts at King’s, totalling at least 85 talented PhD students. The CDT is expecting to welcome its fourth intake of at least 15 students in October 2024. DRIVE-Health is the first health data science training centre in the UK to harness cross-sector collaboration across the NHS, industry, enterprise, policy makers, and academia. Working with diverse partners, DRIVE-Health PhD students develop cutting-edge models which leverage healthcare data to improve patient outcomes, streamline operations, and enhance clinical decision-making processes. EPSRC CDT DRIVE-Health’s vision is informed by three core goals: To provide world-class training in health data science research to the next generation of health data scientists, who will have the multidisciplinary skills needed to enable transformations in public health and breakthrough treatments. To solve the most challenging problems in data-driven health research through a diverse community of the brightest minds in health data science and an open, collaborative culture which fosters exchange and champions innovation. To co-create a translational cross-sector collaboration with the NHS, industry, enterprise, policy makers and academia. Professor Richard Dobson, Co-Director of DRIVE-Health and Professor of Medical Informatics at King’s IoPPN, says "As more data from biological, social, genomic, imaging, smart devices, and electronic health records becomes available, there are significant opportunities to revolutionise the way healthcare is delivered. Through DRIVE-Health, we will train some of the brightest minds in health data science to develop cutting-edge tools which utilise data to improve healthcare systems and patient outcomes." "This is an exciting time for medicine, with new data paradigms creating a novel research and implementation landscape covering the full span from cell to society. Over the next nine years, DRIVE-Health will nurture world-class researchers that will chart that landscape and drive the UK’s health data agenda." Professor Vasa Curcin, Co-Director of DRIVE-Health and Professor of Health Informatics at King’s FoLSM. The DRIVE-Health PhD Programme (2024-2032) focuses on five key scientific research themes: Sustainable health data systems engineering: Investigates methods to develop secure and scalable software systems for healthcare. Theme lead: Dr Zina Ibrahim. Multimodal patient data streams: Integrates diverse patient data types for analysis, including wearables and electronic health records. Theme lead: Dr Jorge Cardoso. Complex simulations and digital twins: Builds simulated environments to train AI models for healthcare applications. Theme lead: Dr Steffen Zschaler. Next-generation clinical user interfaces: Ensures healthcare data science applications are usable in clinical settings. Theme lead: Professor Nick Holliman. Co-designing impactful patient-centric healthcare solutions: Co-producing and co-designing healthcare solutions to maximise impact across all themes. Theme lead: Professor Claire Steves. On top of the £7.9m provided by the EPSRC, DRIVE-Health has received over £5.1m from partners, as well as in-kind contributions worth nearly £4m.

We are delighted to announce that our first Seminar Series of 2024 will be hosted by the esteemed Dr Yves-Alexandre de Mountjoye from Imperial College, London. Companies and governments are increasingly relying on privacy-preserving techniques to collect and process sensitive data. In this talk, Yves-Alexandre will discuss their efforts to red team deployed systems and argue that red teaming is essential to protect privacy in practice. He will describe how traditional de-identification techniques mostly fail in the age of big data and then show how implementation choices and trade-offs have enabled attacks against real-world systems, from query-based systems to differential privacy mechanisms and synthetic data. He plans to conclude by describing recent successes in using AI to automatically discover vulnerabilities.

We were delighted to welcome Professor Paulo Missier who hosted last seminar series of 2023. The past few years have seen the emergence of what the AI community calls “Data-centric AI”, namely the recognition that some of the limiting factors in AI performance are in fact in the data used for training the models, as much as in the expressiveness and complexity of the models themselves. One analogy is that of a powerful engine that will only run as fast as the quality of the fuel allows. A plethora of recent literature has started exploring the connection between data and models in depth, along with startups that offer “data engineering for AI" services. Some concepts are well-known to the data engineering community, including incremental data cleaning, multi-source integration, or data bias control; others are more specific to AI applications, for instance the realisation that some samples in the training space are "easier to learn from” than others. In this “position talk”, Paulo suggested that, from an infrastructure perspective, there is an opportunity to efficiently support patterns of complex pipelines where data and model improvements are entangled in a series of iterations. He focused in particular on end-to-end tracking of data and model versions, as a way to support MLDev and MLOps engineers as they navigate through a complex decision space.

DRIVE-Health's PhD student, Zeljko, launches a podcast where doctors and developers deep dive into the possibilities of AI in healthcare.

We were delighted to welcome Dr Daniel Schofield who hosted our September seminar series. Daniel provided an overview of the team that hosts the internship scheme at NHS England and offered further insights on how the scheme is designed, information on a couple of recent projects plus those available for the coming intake. He presented the different ways of working in the scheme and within the wider organisation.

Interactive workshops with different themes, guest speakers from industry and academia and a final panel discussion with our guest experts.

We are delighted to welcome Professor W.H.Langdon from UCL to host our June seminar series.

We were delighted to have Nick Holliman, from KCL host our May seminar series. Nick demonstrated how their recent research applying information theoretic methods to the challenges of urban data vizualisation addresses key questions for visualization researchers, and argues that successful data visualization increasingly needs rigorous underpinning science.

Dr Peter Waggett from IBM Research UK hosted our April series. Peter is the IBM UK Research Director and Leader of IBM Hursley Emerging Technology Program.

Our wonderful student, Tareen Dawood, presents her work on the idea of uncertainty calibration in #AI for decision-support

We were delighted to welcome Dr Maqbool Hussain, from Derby University, who presented our March Seminar Series.

A London-based startup looking to transform psychosis care through the power of speech has been developing machine learning algorithms that will detect impending psychosis from speech samples collected using just a smartphone. With Psyrin, practitioners along the psychosis care pathway will save time, improve triage accuracy, and increase capacity. Julianna, one of the co-founders of Psyrin has been inspired by the suffering of her loved ones to work on solving mental health problems. By studying psychology, she realized the importance of prevention in mental health care. "In case of severe mental disorders, especially in psychosis, the effect of prevention and early intervention can be really difference-making in the patient's life. However, preventative treatments need tools and technology to upscale and be accessible for as many people as possible." At Psyrin, they want to unlock the potential of objective, scalable, AI-powered analysis of speech to help clinicians screen, triage and monitor and understand patients better, in a more effective way and eventually, use their technology to transform psychosis care pathways from reactive to preventative. Supported by the King's Entrepreneurship Institute .

Foresight has been developed by one of our PhD students, Zeljko Kraljevic, as part of the COGSTACK platform to forecast future medical events and interventions.

We were delighted to welcome Professor Isaac Kohane, from Harvard Medical School, who presented our February Seminar Series.

Eoin Fullam, from the Department of Pscyhological Studies at Birkbeck University hosted our first seminar series of 2023 with discussions around formal bias in AI chatbot therapy. For a list of our previous and upcoming seminars, please see our Seminar Series .