Post Doctoral Research Associate

About us

The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London is one of the oldest law schools in England and recognised globally as one of the best law schools in the world. The School was established in 1831 and has played an integral role in the life of King's since the university was formed almost 200 years ago.

The School is based in the East Wing of Somerset House on King's Strand Campus in London. Our location means that we are in the heart of legal London with the Houses of Parliament, government departments, the Royal Courts of Justice, the Inns of Court and the offices of global law firms all within walking distance.

About the role

We are recruiting a Post Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) to work within the Centre for Data Futures (CDF) at King’s College London, in close collaboration with Prof Yulan He (KCL computer science) and her NLP group.

The post is central to the NAVIGATE research programme, which investigates how different modes of AI uncertainty expression affect the quality of human reasoning – specifically the capacity for genuine engagement with views that differ from one’s own (what the programme terms “doxastic plasticity”). The programme develops and deploys LLM-based systems in morally loaded professional contexts, including healthcare, law and education, and asks: what scaffolding strategies preserve the kind of deliberative openness required for collective norm-refinement?

The PDRA will lead the design, implementation, and evaluation of the programme's computational experiments. This includes developing experimental interfaces built around large language models, designing prompting and fine-tuning strategies to vary how models express uncertainty, and building evaluation pipelines to measure the downstream effects on human reasoning. The PDRA will collaborate with Prof. Yulan He (KCL Institute for AI, NLP) on the technical pipeline.

The post is offered as a full-time 24-month contract (with possibility of extension, depending on further research funding), with a start date as soon as possible.

You should hold a PhD in Computer Science, with expertise in Natural Language Processing, and have a demonstrated track record of research at the intersection of NLP and human-centred or social applications. Experience with LLM fine-tuning, uncertainty quantification, or evaluation of language model outputs is particularly desirable.

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