Macquarie University PhD Scholarship in AI-Empowered Disease Diagnosis 2026

This scholarship is designed to support HDR students in advancing research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and health. This scholarship supports research on AI-powered tools for disease diagnosis and generated intervention suggestion, benefiting healthcare providers and communities by advancing early disease diagnosis and support strategies.

This research project aims to develop and validate novel AI models for disease diagnosis by leveraging multi-modal learning on large-scale, open clinical datasets such as MIMIC-IV. The core challenge is to effectively integrate heterogeneous data types – including clinical notes, time-series physiological data and lab results – into a unified diagnostic system.

A key innovation will be the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to interpret and encode unstructured text from physician notes and reports, transforming them into rich, structured embeddings that can be fused with numerical data. This approach promises to create a more holistic and nuanced patient representation than models relying on a single data type.

The primary scholarship work will involve designing advanced multi-modal fusion architectures to merge these diverse data streams. The research will tackle critical issues such as:

• handling missing data
• ensuring model interpretability for clinical trust
• validating the system's ability to generalise across patient populations.

The ultimate goal is to improve the speed and accuracy of medical decision-making, by creating a robust AI assistant that can support clinicians by:

• identifying complex patterns
• suggesting differential diagnoses
• flagging high-risk cases.

Research aims

• LLM integration for clinical text: fine-tune or prompt-engineer LLMs to effectively interpret and summarise clinical notes from MIMIC-IV, extracting relevant medical concepts for diagnosis
• Dynamic fusion techniques: develop novel neural networks (eg cross-modal attention mechanisms) to dynamically fuse the encoded text from LLMs with time-series data and structured EHR entries
• Validation and benchmarking: rigorously evaluate the multi-modal system's performance on specific diagnostic tasks against traditional single-modal models and clinical baselines, ensuring its practical utility and superior accuracy.

Table of Content

• Summary
• Benefits
• Requirements
• Application Deadline
• How To Apply

Summary

• Application DeadlineMarch 1, 2026
• ValueFully Funded
• Study LevelPhD
• SponsorMacquarie University
• Eligible CountryAll Countries

Benefits

The scholarship comprises:

• a tuition fee offset/scholarship
• a living allowance stipend.

The value of each stipend scholarship is $39,700 per annum (full time, indexed) for three years.

Requirements

• This scholarship is available to eligible candidates, who have obtained a Master by Research (MRes) degree, to undertake a three-year PhD program.

Check also:
2025 Faculty of Engineering International Tuition Fee Research Scholarship at The University of Sydney Australia
Scholarship winning strategies for 2026 (Upcoming Webinar)

Application Deadline

How To Apply

Contact: Yipeng Zhou

• T:+61 (2) 9850 6348
• E:[email protected]

For more information, kindly visit Macquarie University scholarship webpage.