Research Scientist

Please note that although this role is advertised as a Research Scientist, your contractual job title will be “Research Associate - Inkfish: Large Language Models”

About Us 

EMBRACE is a visionary, multicomponent International research programme, the first of its kind in the world, supported by Inkfish with £35M core funds over six years, starting in April 2025. It is a global study of 60,000 participants, including 20,000 mothers, 20,000 infants and up to 20,000 partners. 

About the role

The post of Research Scientist on the EMBRACE study led by Professor Josip Car primarily focuses on developing personalised Large Language Model (LLMs) for health coaching that provide context-sensitive, real-time recommendations following exercise sessions based on diverse health and lifestyle data. The integration of social intelligence features, such as empathy and theory-of-mind capabilities, will be explored to enhance user engagement. In addition, the project will investigate multilingual capabilities and cultural alignment to ensure the models are effective across global contexts. There will also be opportunities to develop research profile, travel for demonstrations and presentations, and contribute to academic publications.

The post is based in the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine, entirely focussed on the EMBRACE programme, and will be closely affiliated with, and spend time working with, the Informatics Department in the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences.

The post holder is required to hold a PhD degree in Computer Science or other relevant discipline. They will have skills in natural language processing and deep learning, along with experience (ideally) of studying the reasoning capabilities and/or personalisation of LLMs.

This is a full time post (35 hours per week), and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 31-July-2029.

About You

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

• PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence or a very closely related discipline *
• Research record in NLP as evidenced by publications in high quality journals and conferences
• Sufficient breadth or depth of specialist knowledge in the discipline and of research methods and techniques to work within established research programmes
• Good effective communication (both oral and written) skills, including research papers and reports, and presentations at conferences
• Experience of writing research reports and papers accessible to both academic and lay audiences
• Good interpersonal skills, with evidence of networking across teams and complex organisations, along with external partners
• Project management skills – the ability to initiate, plan, organise, implement and deliver programmes of work to tight deadlines

* Please note that this is a PhD level role but candidates who have submitted their thesis and are awaiting award of their PhDs will be considered. In these circumstances the appointment will be made at Grade 5, spine point 30 with the title of Research Assistant. Upon confirmation of the award of the PhD, the job title will become Research Associate and the salary will increase to Grade 6.

Desirable criteria

• Experience with personalised LLM or LLM reasoning techniques
• Familiarity with multi-modal learning or user modelling
• Ability or potential to contribute to the development of funding proposals in order to generate external funding to support research projects

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