Dr Isabel Sassoon
Senior Lecturer

Summary

Dr Isabel Sassoon is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Computer Science at Brunel University London, where she is also Director of Education in the Department of Computer Science. Her research examines reasoning in AI systems, including statistical modelling, automated reasoning, and large language models (LLMs), with a focus on how model outputs are justified, explained, and evaluated in real‑world contexts.

A unifying theme of her work is the use of computational argumentation as a formal framework for understanding and supporting reasoning in data‑driven systems. Her research contributions are in the fields of open science, explainable AI and decision support systems. She holds a PhD in Informatics from King’s College London, where her doctoral research developed a computational argumentation‑based approach to support statistical model selection, helping formalise how analysts justify modelling decisions given data, assumptions, and research objectives.

More recently, her work has focused on reasoning in large language models (LLMs). She investigates how computational argumentation can be used to evaluate, steer, and improve LLM reasoning, including how models respond to critical questioning, detect reasoning errors, and revise conclusions.

Her applied research spans healthcare and public policy, including serving as Brunel Lead Investigator on the UKRI AHRC‑funded IMMUNE project, which examined the risks and unintended consequences of COVID‑19 immunity certification systems. She has extensive experience teaching quantitative data analysis at postgraduate level. Prior to academia, she spent over a decade working in industry as a data science consultant, including at SAS UK.

Isabel is a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and Editorial Board Member of Real World Data Science, 

Qualifications

• PhD, Informatics, King's College London, UK.
• BA. Statistics and Operations Research and Economics, Tel Aviv University, Israel.
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Responsibility

Director of Teaching and Learning, Department of Computer Science