Lei Clifton is a Senior Researcher at the Nuffield Department of Primary Health Sciences. She is the Programme Director of the MSc in Applied Digital Health, where she is also module leader and lecturer, working alongside the Academic Directors, Profs. John Powell and Catherine Pope.
Her research interest is at the interface of medical statistics and AI, with over 20 years of research experience. Her work focuses on a wide range of methodology, including foundation models (and large language models) for healthcare, disease prediction, and the fusion of AI with medical statistics. Much of this work collaborates closely with the "AI for Healthcare" group in the Department of Engineering Science, where she also holds an affiliation.
After studying engineering and machine learning, Lei did her postdoctoral training at the Department of Engineering Science (2009-14), before training as a medical statistician under Prof. Doug Altman at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine (2014-18). Subsequently, she was team leader in the Nuffield Department of Population Health (2019-24), where she led a programme of research in translational epidemiology.
When at home, Lei can be found painting watercolours, practising yoga, and making noise on the violin with friends.
