Paul Taylor

[Starting stipend of £28,212 per annum plus tuition fees at the UK Home rate; overseas candidates may need to cover the difference to overseas fees if not eligible for Home fee status.] This 3.5-year PhD studentship at University College London is based in the Institute of Health Informatics and is supervised by Professor Paul Taylor . The project, AI for Eliciting Patient Histories , examines how artificial intelligence can be integrated into patient consultations to improve interaction between clinicians and patients. The research focuses on two major forms of technology transforming consultations: AI scribes, which record and transcribe consultations and generate summaries for clinical review, and conversational agents or chatbots, which can elicit information directly from patients. The project will use insights from the literature on conventional clinical encounters, history-taking, and shared decision-making to inform the design of conversational agents. The successful candidate will also develop and test AI-based methods for analysing and assessing transcribed consultations. This includes exploring consultation characteristics and investigating how factors such as age and gender may shape interaction patterns and outcomes. The studentship is positioned within a collaborative environment that brings together an AI start-up, healthcare-focused AI researchers, and clinicians involved in communication-skills teaching for future doctors. The award offers research training in a vibrant academic setting and includes an expectation of contributing to teaching within the Institute of Health Informatics during the PhD.