Me

Victoria Smith

Researcher in Biomedical NLP

London, UK

v.smith.20@ucl.ac.uk

LinkedIn | CV | GitHub


Bio

Hello and welcome to my website! Thank you for visiting! I am a third year PhD student in Biomedical Natural Language Processing (NLP) on the CDT for AI Enabled Healthcare Systems at UCL. My current research is focused on extracting Pharmacokinetic Data from tables and free text in Scientific Literature and using this extracted data to predict Pharmacokinetic Parameters. This project is developing my skill set in NLP, Machine Learning and Pharmacometrics

I am passionate about health and how machine learning and data science can be exploited to improve health outcomes. I am also passionate about deploying machine learning safely and ethically. My career aspiration is to make an impact in health by building robust computational models which allow better decisions to be made, across drug development, clinical trials and in the clinic, to benefit both patients and health professionals.

About Me!

In my spare time I enjoy getting active, especially in the great outdoors (you may find me cycling, bouldering, running, hiking, kickboxing or yoga-ing!), I'm a foody (you may find me trying new cuisines, cooking up a storm for friends and family, or making artisan chocolates), I love to travel (find me bicycle touring across europe) and I enjoy relaxing with a good book (as said by C.S. Lewis - “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”)!

Books I Like

Non-Fiction
  • Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cath O'Neil
  • Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a world designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez
  • The Diet Myth: The Real Science behind what we Eat, by Tim Spector
  • She Has Her Mothers Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, by Carl Zimmer
  • Breathe: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor
Fiction
  • Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus
  • The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak
  • Captain Corelli's Mandolin, by Louis De Bernieres
  • The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern
  • Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead


Education

UCL UKRI CDT in AI-Enabled Healthcare Systems, Institute of Health Informatics
2021 - Current

PhD Candidate, NLP for Information Extraction in Pharmacokinetics

Supervisors: Joe Standing, Frank Kloprogge, Waty Lilaonitkul

Collaborators: Palang Chotsiri & Thanaporn Wattanakul (MORU), Jose Antonio Cordero Rigol, Maria Rosa Balleste, Mario Duran Hortola, Mireia Poch Mascaró & Fanlo Escudero Olga (Blanquerna), Gill Mundin (AZ), Jan-Stefan van der Walt (Occams), Hiie Soeorg (UCL)


Birkbeck University of London
2021 - 2022

PGCert, Statistics for Data Science, Merit


UCL UKRI MRes in AI-Enabled Healthcare Systems, Institute of Health Informatics
2020 - 2021

MRes, AI Enabled Healthcare Systems, First Class

Supervisors: Joe Standing, Frank Kloprogge, Waty Lilaonitkul, Ferran Gonzalez Hernandez

Collaborators: Palang Chotsiri & Thanaporn Wattanakul (MORU), Gill Mundin (AZ)


UCL Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology
2014 - 2018

MSci, Neuroscience, First Class

Supervisors: Francis Edwards, Dervis Salih

Research Experience

NHS Data Science Intern
June 2023 - November 2023

About the Scheme | Repo

| Blog

Project on Investigating Privacy Concerns and Mitigations in Clinical Language Models.

Mentors: Dan Schofield, Jonny Pearson


Enrichment Studentship at the Alan Turing Institute
Sept 2022 - Sept 2023

About the Scheme | Preprint

Worked on a survey regarding Identifying and Mitigating Privacy Risks Stemming from Language Models Privacy with the Safe and Ethical AI Team.

Mentors: Ali Shahin Shamsabadi

Collaborators: Adrian Weller, Carolyn Ashurst


Teaching & Supervision

Lead PGTA for MSc Digital Health and Entrepreneurship at the UCL Global Business School for Health
Sept 2023 - Feb 2024

Lead TA on the Digital Health and AI Technology course: Co-designing the module content, teaching/lecturing, developing the marking key and leading on marking coordination between TAs, supervising students to develop healthcare chatbots and full business cases.

Module Lead: Waty Lilaonitkul


Supervisor for iBSc in Mathematics, Computers and Medicine Research Project
November 2023 - May 2023

Project on Pharmacokinetic Document Classification. Supported on dataset curation and NLP Classification Pipeline development.

Co-supervisors: Zhonghui Huang (UCL), Joe Standing (UCL)


Supervisor for UCL MSc Pharmaceutics Research Project
May 2022 - August 2022

Project on Pharmacokinetic Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction. Supported on the technical pipeline development.

Co-supervisors: Venkatesh Pilla Reddy (AstraZeneca), Joe Standing (UCL)


Publications & Posters

Invited Presentations

  • London Pharmacokinetics Interest Group (LPIG), Regular Speaker, 2021-Current
  • Great Ormand Street DRE Data & Analytics Seminar Series, Invited Speaker, 26/03/2021
  • UCL Global Business School for Health Digitial Health Techologies Module, Lecturer, 28/11/2023
  • AstraZeneca AI Natural Language Processing CoP event, Invited Speaker, 20/04/2023
  • CAI4H Conference, Invited Speaker, 04/05/2023
  • NICE Pathways Coordination Forum - AI & Digital Regulations Service, Invited Speaker, 17/11/2023
  • UCL Institute of Health Informatics Seminar, Invited Speaker, 21/02/2024

External Training

  • Oxford MLxHealth Summer School, 2023
  • EPSRC Responsible Innovation, 2022
  • The Turing Institute AI Ethics & Governance, 2022
  • Conception X Venture Scientist Deep Tech Training Program, Cohort V, 2022
  • PSM1 Scrum Master (Agile Software Development), 2019