Ernest is medical director at Ufonia Limited, where he coordinates clinical, regulatory and safety aspects of Ufonia’s autonomous clinical conversational assistant, Dora. He is also a practicing ophthalmologist on secondment from ophthalmology surgical training in the North London Deanery.

Ernest is also a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of York’s Assuring Autonomy International Programme, exploring a safety case for the implementation of voice-based, autonomous clinical conversational agents in healthcare. He is an alumnus of the Value-Based Healthcare Intensive Seminar at the Harvard Business School, and an NHS Clinical Entrepreneur. He leads a module on regulation and safety of software-as-a-medical device on the UCL Bioscience Entrepreneurship MSc, and is a member of the Faculty of Clinical Informatics. He is also a qualified NHS Digital clinical safety officer.