My Eight-Week Internship with CSC

21 October 2026

Featured image: enrico bet, Unsplash.

Zipporah is a master’s student at the University of Warwick who is studying Big Data and Digital Futures. She joined CSC for eight weeks as an intern on the Health Data Science Black Internship Programme as a member of the class of 2026. This was organised by Health Data Research UK (HDR UK).

During my internship with the Clinical Scientific Computing (CSC) team at Guy’s and St Thomas’ (GSTT), I had the opportunity to support several projects exploring how AI can be used safely and effectively within healthcare, which was a central aim of the HDR UK internship. This experience gave me valuable insights into the work that takes place behind the scenes to ensure that the AI tools being deployed across the NHS are not only innovative but also reliable, suitable for clinical use and ultimately helping the people who need them most.

One of the key highlights of the internship was supporting the evaluation of data versioning tools for machine learning projects. I explored how these tools could integrate with platforms already used by the team (including XNAT, Snowflake and MLflow) to improve reproducibility and traceability by maintaining a clear record of the data used throughout the development, evaluation and monitoring of AI models. In a natural extension of this work, I delivered a presentation to the team in which I compared different data versioning tools.

This work complemented my contribution to the team’s quality management system (QMS), for which I reviewed the requirements of the Medical Devices Regulations (MDR) and updated CSC’s documentation relating to post-deployment monitoring and trend analysis for AI as a Medical Device (AIaMD) and Software as a Medical Device (SaMD). In doing so, I gained a deeper understanding of the importance of risk management, governance and ongoing monitoring in ensuring the safe deployment of AI tools in healthcare.

I also supported the development of a research ethics web app designed to help digitise the administrative process for research ethics applications. Each project I contributed to felt connected to the wider NHS goal of moving from analogue to digital, and I couldn’t be prouder of contributing to the work that the CSC team does.

At the start of the internship, my goals were to improve my coding skills and gain a better understanding of how AI models are developed, evaluated and monitored in real-world healthcare environments. Through the projects I supported, I was able to achieve these goals while learning from brilliant and supportive colleagues. The ‘10x workshops’, the journal clubs and the discussions on AI fairness were particularly valuable to me in terms of helping me to understand how AI, ethics, regulations and clinical practices intersect.

This internship has truly reinforced my enthusiasm for supporting the safe and responsible use of AI to improve healthcare outcomes, and I am grateful to both the CSC team and HDR UK for an amazing eight weeks!

Follow us on LinkedIn for more updates on CSC activities.