Fergus Imrie
Applied machine learning researcher
I’m an AI researcher at the University of Oxford, where I develop machine learning methods to help tackle challenges in healthcare and drug discovery.
I’ve always wanted my research to have a positive impact on the real-world. Healthcare and drug discovery felt like the perfect place to do that. Both are areas where better tools could help scientists make faster, more informed decisions, and ultimately improve people’s lives.
As an undergraduate, I studied mathematics at the University of Oxford, where I took several courses in statistics and probability. This gave me a way of thinking about patterns in data, randomness, and evidence, which led naturally into AI and machine learning when I began my DPhil.
A lot of my work is about helping computers learn from the kinds of data scientists often face in the real world. Sometimes we only have a limited quantity of data; in other cases, data can be noisy, messy, expensive to collect, or difficult to interpret. In drug discovery, for example, researchers may have many possible molecules they could test, but only limited time and resources. I’m interested in how AI can help guide those choices.
What inspires me is the possibility of using AI as a tool for discovery. My goal is not to replace scientists, but to help them ask better questions and make better decisions.
