Quang N. Nguyen

Applied AI Researcher is probably the best description I can come up with for myself, although it isn’t exactly how I feel. If I added a dash of ‘clinical’ to it, it would be closer to the mark, but still not quite right either. Perhaps the most apt way to describe myself and my line of work is simply: using computers to (1) understand and, from that understanding, (2) improve human well-being.

If I had 48 or 72 hours in a day, I would love to extend that mission to all life forms on Earth and beyond. But for obvious reasons, I have to settle for only humans for now. If I can advance that cause even just a little, it will be a life well lived.

Professionally, I am receiving my PhD (viva passed) and obtained Master’s degrees in AI-enabled Healthcare Systems from University College London (UKRI-funded CDT), under supervision of Associate Prof Nikolas Pontikos and Prof Honghan Wu. Before that, I got my Bachelor of Engineering at the Biomedical Engineering School of International University, Vietnam National University.

During my PhD years, I was also a Research Fellow (honorary) at Moorfields Eye Hospital, helping various research groups to obtain data from free-text clinical notes using Large Language Models, which was the main topic of my PhD. I was also a Visiting Student Researcher at Dr Sophia Wang’s Ophthalmic Informatics and Artificial Intelligence Group, Byers Eye Institute, Stanford University for 6 months.

I will join Pearse Keane’s AI lab at UCL Institute of Ophthalmology to continue my PhD work. This time, we aim to translate it into a real software service that transforms how clinical researchers collect data from clinical letters at Moorfields.