Research Fellow

Overview

The Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College London is recruiting a Research Fellow in participatory methods for its Centre for Data Futures, established in 2024 to pioneer participatory infrastructure across the AI lifecycle. The centre envisions communities that actively shape the AI systems affecting their lives and keep agency over the data they generate. The postholder will lead the participatory refinement workstream of the NAVIGATE research programme, funded by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

NAVIGATE investigates how different ways of expressing AI uncertainty affect the quality of human reasoning, particularly the capacity to engage genuinely with views that differ from one's own. Its first phase used simulated conversations between language models. The postholder will first help develop and complete the second, human phase, which tests the programme's ethical dilemmas and scaffolding strategies with students and online participants, working with the centre's NLP researcher and Prof Yulan He on the technical pipeline. They will then turn these strategies into a participatory layer through which communities can collectively assess and reshape how a language model expresses uncertainty, beginning with professional communities such as GPs, educators and legal practitioners. This includes designing and facilitating co-design sessions, developing evaluation methods, and leading the specification of a public-facing demonstrator built with design-engineering collaborators at Imperial College London, while working with the Data Empowerment Clinic.

Requirements

Candidates may hold a PhD in fields such as experimental or quantitative social sciences, human-computer interaction, design research, experimental psychology, digital humanities, health services research, education, public policy research or science and technology studies. A record of research with human participants is needed, ideally covering both experimental studies and participatory or co-design methods. No programming expertise is required. Experience coordinating projects and supervising junior researchers, and published research, are expected.

What you get

The full-time post is 35 hours per week on a fixed-term contract until 30 June 2028, starting on 1 January 2027, with possible extension depending on further funding. Pay is £53,947 to £63,350 per annum including London Weighting Allowance. The school is based at Somerset House on the Strand campus in London.

Key dates

The closing date is 18 October 2026.