Tim Schubert – My Cambridge Experience

The very first day I set foot in Cambridge, I met Tim Oosterlinck.

We had only seen each other online once but since I knew no one in town, I sent him a message.
Tim didn’t just reply—he immediately invited me to dinner at Downing College.

That dinner sparked a friendship that’s grown into something special. These days, we’re sometimes referred to simply as “the Tims.”

What connects us?

Shared memories, like narrowly avoiding disaster while punting on the River Cam.
And shared passion—a fascination with individualised medicine and the intersection of AI and healthcare.

We’ve had the privilege of learning from some of the brightest minds in machine learning at Mihaela van der Schaar’s lab at the University of Cambridge. And we’re both convinced of one thing:
Machine learning will empower doctors to deliver exactly the care an individual patient needs.

Yet that will not happen by itself. Clinicians will be key stakeholders in this process—mediating and explaining predictions to their patients. That’s why understanding AI isn’t optional for future doctors. It’s essential for the safe, effective, and ethical use of AI.

Together with Prof Mihaela van der Schaar, Prof Robert Stevens, and Prof Patrick Maxwell, Tim and I co-authored our first joint paper. It presents a three-tiered model of medical AI expertise, highlights key challenges, and offers practical suggestions for AI education. It’s just been published in The Lancet eClinicalMedicine!

You can read the paper here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(24)00547-9/fulltext

I’m beyond grateful to:

1) Mihaela for her dedicated mentorship

2) St Catharine’s College Cambridge, Heidelberg University, Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, and the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine for funding my time in Cambridge

3) All the individual people who’ve made this one of the most inspiring periods of my life

Scrolling through photos for this post reminded me just how much moments—and the people behind them—have shaped me in the past years.

There’s more to come from “the Tims”—stay tuned! 🫱🏼‍🫲🏽