Meet: Dr Richard Rosch

A clinician-scientist specialising in paediatric epilepsy, Richard's research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience and clinical practice. His work seeks to understand how activity emerges across the brain, from individual neurons and synapses through to large-scale networks, and how those processes go awry in neurological disorders.

Dr Richard Rosch is an AI+ Senior Fellow at King's College London. These interdisciplinary fellowships are central to King's £18 million strategic investment in academic excellence and demonstrate King's commitment to transforming AI research and innovation across all disciplines.

Originally from Germany, Richard came to the UK to study medicine at Oxford, where an early interest in neuroscience developed into a fascination with paediatric neurology and epilepsy. What captivated him was the complexity of the condition.

"Epilepsy isn't one thing," he says. Richard explains that paediatric epilepsy can have many causes, including single gene mutations that produce recognisable patterns of symptoms, but that researchers still do not fully understand how those genetic changes translate into clinical presentation.

That question led him beyond the clinic and into research. After several years of clinical work, Richard completed a PhD in computational neuroscience, exploring how scientists can infer what is happening within the brain from the signals they are able to record. Since then, he has built a career combining mathematics, biology, neuroscience and medicine to better understand the mechanisms underlying epilepsy and neurodevelopmental disorders.

A recurring theme throughout his work is the idea that the brain is never still. Billions of neurons are constantly communicating, generating waves and rhythms of activity that can sweep across the brain in milliseconds. In epilepsy, these patterns become disrupted, leading to seizures and other neurological symptoms. Understanding how those patterns emerge and evolve has become a central focus of Richard's research.

To investigate these questions, Richard and his team work across an unusually broad range of systems. Their research combines approaches from AI, theoretical physics, complex systems analysis and biology, drawing on everything from computer simulations to patient recordings and zebrafish models.

The zebrafish work, carried out in King's Centre for Developmental Neurobiology, is particularly revealing. Because the animals' brains are transparent, researchers can observe seizure activity at the level of individual cells and connect those observations to larger-scale patterns seen in human patients. For Richard, this helps bridge one of the biggest challenges in neuroscience: understanding how processes at the level of molecules and synapses can give rise to activity across entire brain networks.

While AI has become synonymous with enormous datasets and black-box systems, Richard's approach is different. Working in paediatric epilepsy means dealing with relatively small patient populations, where purely data-driven approaches are often insufficient.

Ultimately, his goal is to make those models useful in clinical practice. His research explores how AI and computational models could help predict which patients are most likely to benefit from surgery, guide deep-brain stimulation therapies and support the development of new treatments for epilepsy. Among his current projects is an ambitious ARIA-funded collaboration exploring targeted gene therapies, alongside research into next-generation neuromodulation approaches.

For Richard, the question that drives all this work is surprisingly simple: "What can we do as a result of the models that we couldn't do before?”

That translational mindset is one reason joining King's as an AI+ Senior Fellow appealed so strongly. Alongside its internationally recognised strengths in neuroscience and epilepsy research, he sees the university's commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration as essential for tackling complex scientific problems.

"As a computational neuroscientist, you sit between disciplines. You work with clinicians, physicists, AI researchers, and experimental scientists. King's has created an environment where that kind of interdisciplinary work is genuinely valued."

Looking ahead, Richard hopes to help move epilepsy treatment away from trial and error and towards genuinely personalised care. By combining biological understanding with AI-driven prediction, he hopes to create tools that can help clinicians understand what is driving an individual patient's condition and identify the most effective intervention.

For a researcher who has spent his career connecting ideas across disciplines, it is the natural next step: turning models of the brain into better outcomes for patients.