Riadh Salem, Surgeon and Research Fellow, Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences
For Riadh Salem, a surgeon and a research fellow at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, interdisciplinary collaboration is central to solving problems. Before using ChatGPT Edu, the only way to explore how other disciplines might approach challenges was to attend hackathons, seminars or networking events. While these conversations were valuable, they were also reliant on chance encounters and were often slow to yield the right expertise.
Riadh now uses Generative AI for ‘Deep Research’, leaning on ChatGPT to help him cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. When he tackles a surgical problem, he asks how the same core challenge is framed and solved in other fields. His work focuses on intraoperative surgical quality assurance, and this approach lets him go beyond standard medical literature to learn from high-stakes industries like advanced manufacturing and aerospace. He might, for instance, prompt the system to surface models of sensor-based performance feedback used in aviation. The result could be a set of battle-tested principals from other domains that he can adapt to surgery. This would have been incredibly difficult to do using conventional academic search engines.
What once took weeks of speculative searches or waiting for the right conversations to be held can now be explored in an afternoon. More importantly, ChatGPT helps Riadh to address the challenge of 'unknown unknowns’. By reframing his problem and asking the AI to search across domains, he uncovers entire methodologies and solutions he never knew existed. This shift from "not knowing what I don't know" to "knowing what I don't know", creates a roadmap for targeted investigation and stronger, more innovative research questions.
Riadh’s advice for others: treat ChatGPT not as a search engine, but as a tireless interdisciplinary research assistant. Frame problems broadly, ask AI how other disciplines have approached problems, use it as an ideation partner to spark new perspectives, and always validate outputs against primary sources. The aim isn't to get a final answer from ChatGPT; it's about getting a vetted set of ideas you can then adapt.