Professor Dave Robertson (University of Edinburgh), one of HDR UK’s AI Advisors, will open the session with brief insights from his career advancing AI research and its integration into complex scientific domains.
Bringing a complementary early-career perspective, Valentina Giunchiglia, a PhD student, jointly based at Imperial College London and Harvard University, will discuss her work developing multimodal foundation models for biomedical research.
Her research uses AI to learn patient-specific changes across multiple scales (from single-cell genomics to clinical and cognitive data) to advance precision medicine. She will also reflect on how emerging approaches such as AI agents and AI-in-the-loop experimental design could shape the future of scientific discovery across different domains.
This one-hour lunchtime seminar will explore:
- How different generations of researchers approach the challenges of applying AI to deep science
- Emerging techniques at the intersection of AI, genomics, and clinical data, with a focus on multimodal foundation models
- The emerging role of AI agents and AI-in-the-loop workflows, where model outputs guide data generation, experimental design, and hypothesis refinement
- Opportunities and lessons for Early Career Researchers working with AI-driven discovery and method development in real scientific settings
