Congratulations to Zhiyao for his DPhil

We are delighted to congratulate Dr Zhiyao Luo on the completion of his DPhil at the Department of Engineering Science, Reuben College.

Zhiyao's doctoral research explores how reinforcement learning can help personalise medical treatment using electronic health records. He develops rigorous ways to test and evaluate AI treatment algorithms under realistic clinical conditions, including noisy data and patient variation. His work also investigates how large language models might serve as a simpler alternative to traditional reinforcement learning approaches, while carefully mapping out their limitations. Taken together, this work lays important methodological groundwork for safer, more generalisable intelligent treatment algorithms in real clinical settings.

During his DPhil, Zhiyao was awarded the COSF Scholarship and SBFT Fellowship, and presented a spotlight poster at ICML 2024. He has collaborated widely with researchers both within and beyond the group, contributing to work published in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, npj Digital Medicine, ICML and JAHA, among others.

Following graduation, Zhiyao will be joining ByteDance as a researcher working on foundation large language models. We wish him every success in this next chapter.