King's College London

About us

The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London is one of the oldest law schools in England and recognised globally as one of the best law schools in the world. The School was established in 1831 and has played an integral role in the life of King's since the university was formed almost 200 years ago.​​​​​​​

The School is based in the East Wing of Somerset House on King's Strand Campus in London. Our location means that we are in the heart of legal London with the Houses of Parliament, government departments, the Royal Courts of Justice, the Inns of Court and the offices of global law firms all within walking distance.

About the role

We are recruiting a Post Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) to work within the Centre for Data Futures (CDF) at King’s College London, in close collaboration with Prof Yulan He (KCL computer science) and her NLP group.

The post is central to the NAVIGATE research programme, which investigates how different modes of AI uncertainty expression affect the quality of human reasoning – specifically the capacity for genuine engagement with views that differ from one’s own (what the programme terms “doxastic plasticity”). The programme develops and deploys LLM-based systems in morally loaded professional contexts, including healthcare, law and education, and asks: what scaffolding strategies preserve the kind of deliberative openness required for collective norm-refinement?

The PDRA will lead the design, implementation, and evaluation of the programme's computational experiments. This includes developing experimental interfaces built around large language models, designing prompting and fine-tuning strategies to vary how models express uncertainty, and building evaluation pipelines to measure the downstream effects on human reasoning. The PDRA will collaborate with Prof. Yulan He (KCL Institute for AI, NLP) on the technical pipeline.

The post is offered as a full-time 24-month contract (with possibility of extension, depending on further research funding), with a start date as soon as possible.

You should hold a PhD in Computer Science, with expertise in Natural Language Processing, and have a demonstrated track record of research at the intersection of NLP and human-centred or social applications. Experience with LLM fine-tuning, uncertainty quantification, or evaluation of language model outputs is particularly desirable.

About You

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1.      PhD in Computer Science (or thesis submitted with viva pending) or equivalent experience

2.      Specialist knowledge in NLP or a closely related area of machine learning, with proven experience working with large language models: including fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and evaluation of LLM outputs

3.      Experience or demonstrated interest in uncertainty quantification or the evaluation of uncertainty expression in language model outputs

4.      Proven research experience, as evidenced by publications in peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings

5.      Demonstrated interest in, and ability to engage with, social science and humanities literature relevant to AI system design (e.g., ethics of AI, human-computer interaction, deliberative quality)

6.      A clear interest in developing publications on NLP and the social implications of LLM uncertainty expression

Desirable criteria

1.      Experience of human participant experimental design or evaluation studies

2.      Familiarity with participatory methods or co-design approaches in the context of AI systems

3.      Experience in developing and/or releasing open-access datasets

4.      Experience in presenting research to non-specialist (e.g., policy or practitioner) audiences

Full details of the role and the skills and experience required, can be found in the attached job description which provided on the next page.

* Please note that this is a PhD level role but candidates who have submitted their thesis and are awaiting award of their PhDs will be considered. In these circumstances the appointment will be made at Grade 5, spine point 30 with the title of Research Assistant. Upon confirmation of the award of the PhD, the job title will become Research Associate and the salary will increase to Grade 6.

Further Information

We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming. We embrace diversity and want everyone to feel that they belong and are connected to others in our community.

We are committed to working with our staff and unions on these and other issues, to continue to support our people and to develop a diverse and inclusive culture at King's.

We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the advert. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.

To find out how our managers review your application, please take a look at our ‘ How we Recruit’ pages.