Dr Thomas Monks

Thomas Monks is an Associate Professor of Health Data Science. He holds a joint position between University of Exeter Medical School and the Institute of Data Science and AI. Between 2019 and 2023, he was a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Clinical Operational Research Unit, Department of Mathematics, UCL.

Between 2014 and 2019, Thomas led the NIHR CLAHRC Wessex funded Data Science research group at University of Southampton. His early career was spent as software engineer and Operational Research modeller in industry and the public sector. He worked for 10 years as a researcher with NIHR funded CLAHRC infrastructure.

Thomas is a data scientist and software engineer with expertise in computer simulation methods, optimisation and machine learning in health service delivery. His work aims to translate Data Science and Operational Research tools improve the quality and safety of health and social care.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Artifical Intelligence

• The building, training and evaluation of safe autonomous agents 
• Combining autonomous agents and digital models of physical health service delivery systems
• Evaluation of the capabilities of Open weight Large Language Models (LLMs) on practical problems
• Generation of models using LLMs and autonomous agents

Modelling and simulation

• Methods to improve Open Science and Reproducibility in data science research
• Real time data and Digital Twins health services for prediction and optimisation

Free and Open Source Software, tools and knowledge:

• My GitHub: https://github.com/TomMonks

• sim-tools: a python package to support the education and practice of monte-carlo and discrete-event simulation 

• Python for health data science: a hands on introduction (my free and open source book used for teaching)

• An introduction to building simulation models of health systems using Python (will open a Python editor)

• The Sharing Tools and Artefacts for Reproducible Simulations (STARS) project has numerous tools (Python and R) available.