Dashboard – I'm a Scientist 2024/25

Profile

About Me:

I’m a PhD student at the University of Leeds and my work uses AI to support medical education. I was born and raised in India and I moved to the UK in 2022. I enjoy listening to classical music, playing badminton and chess, and cubing.
My pronouns are:

she/her
My Work:

My research is broadly focused around simulation of virtual patients. This involves creating a video based AI avatar that medical students can interact with to practice clinical communication skills. Most of my work uses generative models, including large language models like ChatGPT.
My Typical Day:

I start my day with a cup of coffee and breakfast. I’m not really a morning person so I begin with the least interesting tasks, i.e., prepping for meetings and answering emails. I spend the rest of the day either reading relevant research or coding up my experiments. I generally work from home and don’t follow a rigid 9 to 5 schedule as I feel much more productive in the evenings. I love listening to music and often have my headphones on for the better part of the day.

Education:

I went to school in New Delhi in India. I received both my undergrad and my first masters from the University of Delhi.
Qualifications:

University of Leeds – PhD (ongoing)

University of Delhi – Master of Computer Applications and B.Sc. (Hons) Computer Science
Work History:

Data Science for Social Good Fellow, University of Warwick

Worked on a project with UNICEF and Save the Children to predict multi-
dimensional child poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Research Intern, University of Delhi

Worked on research projects investigating the use of AI for breast cancer subtype classification, and identifying COVID-19 in chest x-rays.

Volunteer, The Uplift Project, GirlScript Foundation

Taught programming to high school students.
Current Job:

PhD student
Employer:

University of Leeds

Arpita Saggar