Thomas Frost

I am a third-year PhD student at the Institute for Health Informatics, and a part-time Emergency Physician. My research revolves around the applications of offline reinforcement learning to healthcare (specifically personalising drug doses for patients in critical care).

I received my Bachelor of Medicine/Surgery from University of Oxford in 2018, winning the Lord Crewe scholarship for outstanding examination results during my pre-clinical years. I also completed an intercalated research degree looking at the role of BRCA abnormalities in cancer cell mobility, graduating with a 1st class degree. 

I completed my Foundation Training in clinical practice between 2018 and 2020 in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was during that time that I developed an interest in coding, machine learning, and particularly reinforcement learning, following the highly topical results of AlphaZero in self-taught chess. I eventually applied to the competitive AI-Enabled Healthcare CDT programme at UCL, and was awarded full UKRI funding to complete a 4-year MRes+PhD.

I completed my Masters of Research at UCL in 2022, looking at temporal clustering patterns of patients invasively ventilated for COVID-19 pneumonia using Hidden Markov Models. I am now working on my PhD on the use of offline reinforcement learning to optimise IV drug infusions in critical care. I was recently awarded a CDI Innovation 2025 Scholarship, supported by AWS, for my work.