Research Fellow

This position is for a Research Fellow in participatory methods at King's College London's Centre for Data Futures. The role involves leading the participatory refinement of the NAVIGATE research programme, focusing on community assessment and reshaping how LLMs express uncertainty. Essential requirements include a PhD, demonstrated experience in participatory research with human participants, and a track record of published research.

• We are recruiting a Research Fellow in participatory methods to work within the Centre for Data Futures (CDF) at King’s College London. The postholder will lead the participatory refinement workstream of the NAVIGATE research programme, funded by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.
• NAVIGATE investigates how different modes of AI uncertainty expression affect the quality of human reasoning, in particular the capacity for genuine engagement with views that differ from one’s own (what the programme terms “doxastic plasticity”).
• Its first phase worked with synthetic data and used simulated LLM-to-LLM conversations.
• The uncertainty-scaffolding strategies it tested did not differ in how much they shifted the simulated users’ stances, but in the quality of engagement they sustained (Greco et al., 2026, arXiv:2606.05890).
• The postholder will first help develop and complete NAVIGATE’s second (human) phase. This tests the programme’s ethical dilemmas and scaffolding strategies with KCL students as well as online participants, working closely with the Centre’s NLP PDRA and Prof Yulan He (KCL Institute for AI) on the technical pipeline.
• Building on the second phase, the postholder will then turn these strategies (perspective-multiplying, tension-preserving and process-reflecting) into a working participatory layer through which communities can collectively assess and reshape how an LLM expresses uncertainty.
• We begin with professional communities (e.g.
• GPs, educators and legal practitioners), but the wider aim is to allow any community to shape how the AI systems it depends on handle doubt and disagreement.
• At that stage, the Research Fellow will design and facilitate co-design sessions with these communities, develop methods to evaluate what the sessions achieve, and lead the specification of a public-facing demonstrator built with design-engineering collaborators at Imperial College London (Prof Rafael Calvo).
• They will also work with the Centre’s Data Empowerment Clini c, so that community refinement of AI systems does not become a new form of data extraction.
• This is a full time (35 hours per week), and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 30/06/2028, starting on 1 January 2027 (with possibility of extension, depending on further research funding).
• We are interested in researchers whose work intersects with “participation”, and will consider candidates with a PhD in a variety of fields, including experimental and quantitative social sciences, human-computer interaction (HCI), design research, experimental psychology, digital humanities, health services research, education, public policy research, or science and technology studies.
• We seek candidates with a demonstrated track record of research with human participants, ideally including both experimental studies and participatory or co-design methods. No programming expertise is required.
• The postholder should have experience of coordinating research projects and supervising junior researchers, and a record of published research in peer-reviewed journals or other research outputs.

• To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:
• 1. PhD qualified in relevant subject area (or pending results) including experimental and quantitative social sciences, human-computer interaction (HCI), design research, experimental psychology, digital humanities, health services research, education, public policy research, or science and technology studies.
• 2. Proven experience of designing and facilitating participatory, co-design / deliberative research with professional / community groups
• 3. Experience of designing and running experimental or survey studies with human participants, including online recruitment
• 4. Expertise in quantitative or qualitative analysis of human participant data (e.g. questionnaire responses and conversation or group discussion transcripts)
• 5. Proven research experience, as evidenced by publications in peer-reviewed journals, as a book chapter or other research output.
• 6. Demonstrated interest in LLMs, and ability to work with computer scientists and designers to turn research findings into the specification of an interactive system
• 7. Experience leading work packages of a research grant/s or coordinating research projects.
• 8. Experience supervising junior researchers (e.g. research assistants / students)
• 1. Experience of research with healthcare, legal or education professionals
• 2. Experience of preparing research ethics applications or pre-registering studies involving human participants
• 3. Familiarity with data governance, data stewardship or data trusts
• 4. Hands-on familiarity with LLMs, for example prompt design or the evaluation of model outputs
• 5. 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.