PhD Studentship - AI Scientists for Understanding Dementia Modifiable Risk Factors

The GW4 BioMed3 Doctoral Landscape Programme is offering up to 18 MRC funded studentships across a range of biomedical disciplines, with a start date of October 2027.

These four-year studentships provide funding for fees and stipend at the rate set by the UKRI, as well as other research training and support costs, and are available to UK and International students.

This project is in competition for place with the projects across the MRC GW4 BioMed3 Doctoral Landscape Award studentships.  There are a total of 18 studentships available across the partnership.  

Early dementia prediction is an urgent problem to improve the clinical pathway for individuals who are at risk of dementia due to well-established risks such as cognitive decline, lifestyle, medical or genetic factors. This project aims to design an AI system that integrates scientific knowledge for early dementia modelling, based on large language models and causal inference. The project has two stages: first, to construct a causal knowledge graph from scientific papers and cognitive test questionnaire data, and second, to integrate the graph with transformer-based large language models and causal learning. This offers an explainable understanding of personalised risk factors.

These studentships are funded through GW4 BioMed3 MRC Doctoral Landscape Programme and consist of UK tuition fees, as well as a Doctoral Stipend matching UK Research Council National Minimum (£21,805 p.a. for 2026/27, updated each year).

Additional research training and support funding of up to £5,000 per annum is also available.

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