LifeArc's Chris Tomlinson hosts our February Seminar Series
January 31, 2025
It was a pleasure to welcome Chris Tomlinson
from LifeArc,
who delivered our February Seminar Series with his talk,
"Translational Clinical Data Science: from patient data to patient impact".
Chris gave an overview of LifeArc, a self-funded translational research charity, seeking to deliver patient benefit and address unmet needs. As UK Health Data & AI lead, he focuses on how they harness data science and AI to fulfil their aim: to ‘make life sciences, life changing’.
Chris is a clinician by background, specialising in Anaesthesia & Intensive Care, before transitioning to full-time research. His work leverages electronic health records, epidemiology and artificial intelligence at scale to advance our understanding of health and disease, and address the fundamental challenges of precision medicine. His research has been featured in top medical journals and informed both policy and clinical practice internationally.
Seminar Series Event: "Translational Clinical Data Science: from patient data to patient impact"
Date and Time:
Thursday 27 February 2025, 15:00 – 16.00 hrs (BST)
Location: Hodgkin Building, Classroom 6, Guy's Campus
Attendance:
Mandatory for all DRIVE-Health students
Registration: Students, alumni and wider King's College London research community, please email
drive-health-cdt@kcl.ac.uk
to register.
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We are pleased to welcome Simon Ellershaw, PhD Candidate at University College London (UCL) as part of the UKRI UCL Centre for Doctoral Training in AI-enabled Healthcare Systems, who will deliver his talk “Developing Healthcare LLMs: From the NHS to Silicon Valley " as part of our Seminar Series. Abstract: This talk links my PhD and my Silicon Valley internship through one theme: what it really takes to build and deploy LLMs in healthcare. I will introduce Foresight England (Foresight E), a national-scale generative foundation model trained from scratch on 54.9 million de-identified longitudinal NHS EHRs to model patient timelines and enable zero-shot prediction across around 40,000 coded medical events. As NHS England has paused data access pending review, I will focus on the core methodology and lessons learned. I will then switch to my Parexel internship in San Francisco, where I worked in the company’s AI lab on production-focused applications, including pharmacovigilance and protocol de-risking. I will explain how I ended up there, what I worked on, and what I learned, with a candid view of what day-to-day life and work in the Bay Area actually looks like. I will also reflect on how the recent generative AI boom has reshaped the problems teams like ours choose to tackle and the way this work gets built, evaluated, and shipped. Seminar Series Event : “Developing Healthcare LLMs: From the NHS to Silicon Valley" Date and Time: Wednesday 27 May 2026, 15:00 – 16.00 hrs (BST) Location: Judy Dunn, SGDP Building, Denmark Hill Campus Attendance: Mandatory for all DRIVE-Health students; a calendar invitation has already been sent. Registration: Alumni and wider King's College London research community all welcome - please email drive-health-cdt@kcl.ac.uk to let us know if you would like to attend. Biography Simon Ellershaw is a PhD Candidate at University College London (UCL) as part of the UKRI UCL Centre for Doctoral Training in AI-enabled Healthcare Systems, supervised by Prof Richard Dobson and Dr Anoop Shah. His research spans LLM-based generation of hospital discharge summaries, national-scale pre-training of generative models on 57 million electronic health records, and post-training using real-world patient outcomes as verifiable reinforcement-learning rewards. Alongside his PhD, he interned at Parexel AI Labs and now works part-time as an NLP Engineer, developing and deploying production LLM/NLP systems, including applications in pharmacovigilance and quality assurance.
