Research Fellow

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.  

The Centre for Data Futures, established in 2024, pioneers participatory infrastructure across the entire AI lifecycle. We envision a future where communities actively shape the AI systems that affect their lives and maintain agency over the data generated. 

About the role

We are recruiting a Research Fellow in participatory methods to work within the Centre for Data Futures (CDF) at King’s College London. The postholder will lead the participatory refinement workstream of the NAVIGATE research programme, funded by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

NAVIGATE investigates how different modes of AI uncertainty expression affect the quality of human reasoning, in particular the capacity for genuine engagement with views that differ from one’s own (what the programme terms “doxastic plasticity”). Its first phase worked with synthetic data and used simulated LLM-to-LLM conversations. The uncertainty-scaffolding strategies it tested did not differ in how much they shifted the simulated users’ stances, but in the quality of engagement they sustained (Greco et al., 2026, arXiv:2606.05890).

The postholder will first help develop and complete NAVIGATE’s second (human) phase. This tests the programme’s ethical dilemmas and scaffolding strategies with KCL students as well as online participants, working closely with the Centre’s NLP PDRA and Prof Yulan He (KCL Institute for AI) on the technical pipeline.

Building on the second phase, the postholder will then turn these strategies (perspective-multiplying, tension-preserving and process-reflecting) into a working participatory layer through which communities can collectively assess and reshape how an LLM expresses uncertainty. We begin with professional communities (e.g. GPs, educators and legal practitioners), but the wider aim is to allow any community to shape how the AI systems it depends on handle doubt and disagreement.

At that stage, the Research Fellow will design and facilitate co-design sessions with these communities, develop methods to evaluate what the sessions achieve, and lead the specification of a public-facing demonstrator built with design-engineering collaborators at Imperial College London (Prof Rafael Calvo). They will also work with the Centre’s Data Empowerment Clinic, so that community refinement of AI systems does not become a new form of data extraction.

This is a full time (35 hours per week), and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 30/06/2028,  starting on 1 January 2027 (with possibility of extension, depending on further research funding).

We are interested in researchers whose work intersects with “participation”, and will consider candidates with a PhD in a variety of fields, including experimental and quantitative social sciences, human-computer interaction (HCI), design research, experimental psychology, digital humanities, health services research, education, public policy research, or science and technology studies. We seek candidates with a demonstrated track record of research with human participants, ideally including both experimental studies and participatory or co-design methods. No programming expertise is required. The postholder should have experience of coordinating research projects and supervising junior researchers, and a record of published research in peer-reviewed journals or other research outputs. 

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