Dr Ben Holgate joined the Department of Biostatistics & Health Informatics as a Senior Research Fellow in Health-Related Natural Language Processing in 2025, working on the DATAMIND research project on mental health.

In the previous two years he was a Senior Research Fellow in AI Methods Applied to Health Records in the Department of Basic & Clinical Neuroscience working on epilepsy research. He continues in that role on a part-time basis as Co-PI of an MRC-funded epilepsy project.

Dr Holgate's work focuses on AI Health, mostly in applying Large Language Models and other NLP tools to medical texts, but also in applying other data science methodologies.

Prior to joining King’s College London in 2023, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London and taught at the University of York. He also has a background in finance and the media. He holds a DPhil in English from the University of Oxford, and masters degrees in data science (Birkbeck) and finance (University of Sydney). He is the author of Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse (Routledge, 2019).

Research interests

• AI Health
• Natural Language Processing
• Large Language Models
• Data Science
• Literature
• Computational analysis of texts

Expertise and public engagement

• Associate of the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Key publications

• Holgate B., 2019. Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse. Routledge 
• Holgate et al., 2024. Extracting Epilepsy Patient Data with Llama 2. In Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing.

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