PhD in Medical AI: Multimodal Learning, Generative AI, Foundation Models, Digital Twins, VLMs and LLMs

About the Project

Do you want to shape the future of healthcare with cutting-edge AI? Join us to develop the next generation of trustworthy and clinically deployable Medical AI.

This PhD aims to build AI systems that improve healthcare—enhancing clinical workflows, supporting diagnosis, and ultimately improving patient outcomes. The focus is on developing deep learning models that are not only accurate and innovative, but also robust, explainable, and ready for deployment in real clinical environments.

You will explore cutting-edge advances in multimodal learning, generative models, foundation models, digital twins, vision–language models (VLMs), and large language models (LLMs), and apply them across diverse medical domains such as medical scans, clinical text, and electronic health records.

You will join the Medical AI lab in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. We work closely with clinical researchers from the College of Medical and Dental Sciences, partner with local NHS hospitals, and collaborate with international researchers to ensure our work translates into real-world clinical benefit. We work with a variety of medical data modalities, including ultrasound, MRI, CT, microscopy, OCT and more.

Project directions are flexible and tailored to your background and interests. We welcome all students who want to push the frontier of AI for healthcare.

Candidate Requirements

Essential:

• First-class or 2:1 Undergraduate and/or Master’s degree (or international equivalent)
• A background in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Biomedical Engineering, or a related field
• Strong programming skills in Python, with experience in PyTorch or other deep learning frameworks
• Self-motivated, with a clear interest in impactful research and a passion for AI
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills

Desirable:

• Prior research experience in medical image analysis, AI for healthcare, and computer vision.
• Familiarity with modern deep learning methods, especially in multimodal, generative AI, vision-language model, large-language model, foundation model.
• Evidence of research output through publications, participation in challenges, or public GitHub projects.

Further Information

More about the Medical AI group: https://medicalai-lab.github.io/

To enquire about this PhD position or application process, please contact: Dr Qingjie Meng (m.qingjie@bham.ac.uk)

More information (e.g., Entry and language requirements) for School of Computer Science PhD: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/subjects/computer-science-and-data-science-courses/computer-science-phd?nodeId=bb0a6bb5-ece4-4a27-bb9c-f2935d044818&entryId=4887ad35-8514-9800-dce4-6c554b214d60&preventScrollTop=true

Funding Notes

• Home (UK) applicants: Full tuition + stipend.
• International applicants: full international tuition fee and stipend.

We also welcome visiting PhD students and self-funded PhD students.