Me

Victoria Smith

Health Data Scientist

London, UK

victoria.smith226@nhs.net

LinkedIn | GitHub

Bio

Hello and welcome to my website! I am a Health Data Scientist, at Barts Health NHS Trust. I also hold a PhD in AI Enabled Healthcare Systems at UCL. I have a strong methodological background, with experience developing, evaluating and deploying Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning tools in healthcare and life sciences.

I am passionate about health and how machine learning and data science can improve health outcomes. I am committed to the safe and ethical use of AI.

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


Employment History

Health Data Scientist at Barts Health NHS Trust
Jan 2026 - current

Projects spanning development, evaluation and deployment of clinical NLP and disease prediction models:

  • Developing an applied NLP/LLM pipeline to identify and link rehabilitation events from longitudinal EHR data, combining expert annotated corpora with an agentic LLM workflow.
  • Developing the NLP feature extraction for a LightGBM-based lung cancer risk prediction model. Technical lead for Barts for the prospective clinical deployment trial.
  • Built the Trust-wide Data Science & AI Hub to catalogue and enable discovery of clinical and operational AI/data science tools, case studies, training and knowledge.
  • Partnering with clinicians and researchers to scope and design new AI/ML projects, translating clinical problems into technical approaches, assessing feasibility and leading funding proposals.
    • NHS Machine Learning Research Internship
    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

    Machine Learning 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, Joe Standing

    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

    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)

    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)

    Birkbeck University of London
    2021 - 2022

    PGCert, Statistics for Data Science, Merit

    UCL Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology
    2014 - 2018

    MSci, Neuroscience, First Class

    Supervisors: Francis Edwards, Dervis Salih

    Publications & Posters

    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 Digital Health Technologies 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

    • Microsoft Azure GenAIOps, 2026
    • 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