Global St Andrews and Macquarie Doctoral Scholarship - Medicine and Health Innovation

The University of St Andrews and Macquarie University offer a joint doctoral scholarship to support an exceptional student undertaking research on 'Evaluation and Mitigation of Bias in AI Medical Content'. This collaborative program focuses on systematically evaluating biases in medically generated AI content and developing strategies to mitigate their impact on clinical and general users. The research addresses demographic biases affecting diagnosis and treatment recommendations, acquiescence bias where AI systems may inappropriately agree with users, and social desirability bias in discussing stigmatized conditions. Students will enrol at both institutions from the outset, spending 50% of their time at each university. The project employs a mixed-methods approach including systematic bias evaluation, controlled experiments with simulated clinical consultations, user studies with healthcare professionals and patients, and development of bias detection tools and mitigation strategies following Human-Computer Interaction best practices. The student will be supervised jointly by Dr Andrew O'Malley at St Andrews' School of Medicine and Dr David Fraile Navarro at Macquarie's Australian Institute of Health Innovation - Centre for Health Informatics.