AI evaluation & measurement · Applied AI · Behavioural science

Zack van Allen

I’m a behavioural scientist who builds and evaluates AI systems. I bring measurement methods from psychology to the question of whether language models do what we say they do, and I test the answer in real settings, most often health care and education.

Senior Research Associate, University of Ottawa Department of Family Medicine and Bruyère Health Research Institute. My work combines open evaluation studies, working prototypes and peer-reviewed research, from LLM evaluation and qualitative-coding tools to simulation and evidence-synthesis pipelines.

2026–27 AMS Healthcare Fellow in Compassion & AI
Portrait of Zack van Allen
Peer-reviewed publications
28
First-author papers
9
Citations (Google Scholar)
1,800+
Years in research
10+

Projects and research

Three connected lines of work

Evaluation studies that ask whether AI systems do what is claimed of them, applied systems built with the people who will use them, and the behavioural science training behind both.

01

AI evaluation and measurement

Testing whether language models do what we say they do, using the habits of psychological measurement: human reference standards, validated judges, and attention to how much a result depends on the analyst’s choices.

QualFrame and the analytic multiverse

Preprint · open tools

An open-source research prototype for AI-assisted directed content analysis: a language model applies a codebook to transcripts, and a person reviews every proposed code beside its source passage, with provenance, versioned methods and traceable exports.

A screening study of 32 configurations shows how setup choices, and the way agreement is scored, change how well AI coding matches human coding.

LLM feedback on resident scholarly projects

Preprint

A rubric-aligned feedback assistant built on open-weight LLMs, tested in a blinded evaluation of 240 feedback reports: 120 LLM-generated and 120 expert-written.

Expert feedback was rated higher overall, and the gap varied by project stage and type, pointing to where expert review remains most important.

AI-assisted admissions scoring

Evaluation

Evaluated an AI-assisted scoring pipeline for roughly 2,200 autobiographical sketches per admissions cycle, with bilingual support and equity auditing built into the evaluation framework.

Pre-specified targets: ≥0.70 kappa and ≥0.80 AUC, with ~550 faculty hours a year potentially reclaimed.

Pressure or Persuasion?

Exploratory · Inspect

An Inspect evaluation of whether operator instructions push assistants from persuasion towards manipulation when a customer asks to cancel a subscription or opt out of data sharing. Three models, 72 conversations, a deterministic check that the cancel route was given, and two blinded judges validated on 120 reference conversations with planted tactics.

Every model gave the route in its first reply and neither judge flagged manipulation. The result is narrow (two scenarios, three conversations per cell); the reusable part is the measurement.

Intended or Perceived?

Exploratory · not peer reviewed

An exploratory study of whether audio models’ emotion labels track what an actor intended or what listeners heard, using 300 acted clips from CREMA-D and three models, with repeated runs to measure label stability.

The models matched the listener plurality on 64–67% of clips, against 58% for always answering Neutral, and matched the intended emotion on only 23–39%.

02

Applied AI systems

Tools and workflows built with the people who will use them, mostly in health care and education, where privacy, auditability and adoption decide whether anything gets used.

COMPASS: from clinician needs to prototypes

Co-lead · ongoing

A discovery-to-prototype pipeline that starts from what clinicians want built rather than from a technology looking for a use case.

  1. 1 · DiscoverVirtual nominal group study with health care AI experts to rank near-term capabilities and project ideas.
  2. 2 · BuildHackers & Healers hackathon (June 2026): 150 participants, 44 clinician–developer teams.
  3. 3 · TestOnboarding clinics to test prototypes in real clinical settings (in progress).

Referral-triage application

Pre-production · under validation

A deterministic Python application that turns a clinic's manual intake, triage and routing workflow into explicit, reviewable logic, co-designed with clinicians and frontline triage staff.

Validation to date: 95% adjusted agreement with clinical triage decisions across 40 mock cases, using a standardized evaluation rubric.

ED Simulator

Open source · synthetic data

A discrete-event simulator of emergency-department patient flow with an offline 3D replay viewer, for exploring how changes in demand, staffing, capacity and workflow affect flow. Every event and decision can be inspected and replayed.

The included example uses illustrative inputs. The model is not calibrated to a hospital or clinically validated.

Modernizing the Rourke Baby Record

Project design & oversight

An AI-assisted workflow to search, screen, verify and summarize pediatric evidence for the Rourke Baby Record, an evidence-based guide for well-baby and child visits in Canada, aiming to shorten update cycles from months to days while keeping every recommendation source-linked and expert-reviewed.

AI for integrated knowledge translation

JMIR AI 2026

A viewpoint arguing that retrieval-augmented LLMs, run as governed infrastructure with provenance, privacy protections and equity by design, can add a traceable conversational layer over research outputs for decision-makers.

Universal Medical Ingestion Engine

Competition entry

Co-developed an entry for the Kaggle MedGemma Impact Challenge that turns complex medical documents into structured outputs for clinical and operational use.

Departmental AI adoption and governance

Lead author

An AI adoption plan for a multi-portfolio university department, built on a COM-B staff survey and aligned to the university's five-pillar AI roadmap: people, AI governance, data governance, technology and process. Endorsed in principle by senior leadership.

03

Behavioural science foundations

Where the measurement habits come from: a PhD on machine learning and network models of health behaviour, multi-lab replication projects, and systematic reviews of behaviour change.

Machine learning with longitudinal aging data

CLSA

Prospective classification of functional dependence, pre-stroke physical activity and functional recovery, and pathways from pain to dependence in arthritis, using the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.

Multiple health behaviours

Networks & clustering

How health behaviours cluster in more than 40,000 Canadians, temporal networks of health and protective behaviours during COVID-19, and systematic reviews of interventions that target several behaviours at once.

Behaviour change in health care

Implementation

Barriers and enablers to diabetic retinopathy screening, hepatitis C care, vaccination and plasma donation, informed by behavioural theory and patient-oriented research.

Replication and open science

Multi-lab projects

Contributor to Many Labs 3 and the Registered Replication Report of the facial feedback hypothesis, two large multi-lab replication projects, with analysis code for my own studies shared openly.

Fellowship · 2026–2027

Using secure, open-weight AI to protect compassionate care in family medicine

AMS Healthcare Fellowship Compassion & AI Principal investigator

I was named one of twelve fellows in AMS Healthcare's seventh cohort of Compassion and AI Fellows. The fellowship supports a year of protected time, hosted by the University of Ottawa Department of Family Medicine.

The project asks whether open-weight language models running on secure, local infrastructure can take on administrative work in academic family medicine, and whether doing so gives back the time and attention that compassionate care depends on.

AMS Healthcare announcement, September 2026

News

Recent updates

  • Nov 2026

    Released Intended or Perceived?, an exploratory study of whether audio models’ emotion labels track what an actor intended or what listeners heard, with code, analysis plan and results. View on GitHub

  • Nov 2026

    Released an open-source emergency-department simulator: a discrete-event model of patient flow with an offline 3D replay viewer, built on synthetic data. View on GitHub

  • Oct 2026

    New preprint and open tools for AI-assisted qualitative coding: a screening study of 32 configurations shows how setup choices, and the way agreement is scored, change how well AI coding matches human coding. Read the write-up or watch the 8-minute explainer

  • Sep 2026

    COMPASS I preprint posted on near-term AI capabilities and project ideas for primary care, from a virtual nominal group study with health care AI experts. Read the preprint

  • Sep 2026

    Named a 2026–27 AMS Healthcare Fellow in Compassion and AI, one of twelve fellows in the program's seventh cohort. Announcement

  • Jul 2026

    Viewpoint published in JMIR AI: how retrieval-augmented AI could turn static research outputs into living evidence for integrated knowledge translation. Read the paper

Publications

Research outputs

28 peer-reviewed publications, including 9 as first author, plus recent preprints. Over 1,800 citations on Google Scholar.

All publications

2026

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019 and earlier

Also: government and scientific reports on COVID-19 behavioural science and military leadership, and doctoral and master's theses. Full list in the CV, with citation metrics on Google Scholar and ORCID.

Talks & teaching

Talks, workshops and teaching resources

  1. May 14, 2026

    AI, Administrative Burden and Physician Wellness in Family Practice

    Invited workshop, Family Medicine Wellness Workshop, The Ottawa Hospital Department of Family Practice, Ottawa

  2. May 12, 2026

    AI-Driven Automation of Autobiographical Sketch Grading in UGME Admissions

    Ottawa Applied Medical AI Summit, hosted by the Ottawa Medical AI Research Institute (OMARI) and CHEO Research Institute

  3. Apr 2026

    Ethically Integrating AI Into Deductive Qualitative Analysis in Medical Education

    Workshop co-lead, International Congress on Academic Medicine (ICAM 2026), Ottawa

  4. Jun 4, 2025

    Artificial Intelligence in Elderly Care: Looking to the Future

    Invited talk, 16th Annual Care of the Elderly Conference, McMaster University

  5. Apr 27, 2025

    Artificial Intelligence in Primary Care: Envisioning the Future Integration of AI in Family Medicine

    Invited talk, Department of Family Medicine Faculty Retreat

  6. Sep 24, 2024

    The Impact of Physical Activity Pre-Stroke and the Insights From Machine Learning on Functional Dependence

    Invited webinar, Centre of Excellence Webinar Series, Perley Health

  7. Mar 17, 2022

    Temporal Network Dynamics of Multiple Health Behaviours During the COVID-19 Pandemic

    Invited talk, Montreal Behavioural Medicine Centre

Funding

Fellowships and grants

Personal fellowships where I am the principal investigator, and team grants where I am AI lead or co-investigator and others hold the PI role.

$320,000
Personal fellowships and awards
3 competitive awards as principal investigator
$1.97M
Team grants
8 funded projects as AI lead or co-investigator

Personal fellowships

  • AMS Healthcare Fellowship in Compassion and Artificial Intelligence AMS Healthcare · 2026–2027 $75,000
  • Mitacs-Banting Discovery Postdoctoral Fellowship Physical activity engagement and the intention–action gap in older adults $140,000
  • Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarship – Doctoral CIHR · Complexity science and network analysis for health behaviour change $105,000

Team grants

  • Partnering with patients to co-produce a national AI priority agenda for chronic pain CIHR Catalyst Grant: Partnering for Impact · 2026 $125,000
  • Optimizing pandemic preparedness: extending the iCARE study CIHR · public attitudes, intentions and behaviours $952,426
  • POPCORN reporting guidelines for modelling studies CIHR · noncommunicable disease modelling $320,536
  • Co-designing francophone AI health tools with patients and caregivers Association médicale universitaire de Montfort (AMUM) $186,120
  • AsthmaWISE: a multimodal conversational AI companion for asthma CHAMO $135,000
  • Modernizing the Rourke Baby Record: AI-enabled evidence synthesis TOHAMO $135,000
  • EmPOWERing primary care settings to use digital health interventions for chronic pain CIHR Catalyst Grant · 2025 $96,788
  • COMPASS: Consensus on Medical Priorities and AI Solutions in Primary Care The Ottawa Hospital seed fund $15,000

About

Experience and training

Trained in health psychology and behavioural science, with a PhD focused on machine learning and network models of health behaviour, and an MBA.

  1. 2024–present

    Senior Research Associate

    University of Ottawa Department of Family Medicine and Bruyère Health Research Institute
    • Lead applied AI work across both institutions, from clinician priority-setting to prototypes and evaluation.
    • Built a deterministic referral-triage application with clinicians (pre-production, under validation).
    • Evaluate LLM tools for medical education, including resident feedback and admissions scoring.
    • Authored the department's AI adoption plan and advise leadership on AI adoption.
    • Provide research-methods consulting and mentorship to faculty, physicians and research staff.
  2. 2023–2024

    Mitacs-Banting Discovery Postdoctoral Fellow

    University of Ottawa
    • Machine learning and longitudinal modelling of aging, stroke and functional dependence.
  3. 2018–2024

    Clinical Research Coordinator, then Clinical Research Associate

    Ottawa Hospital Research Institute
    • Led a multi-province patient-oriented project on diabetic retinopathy screening.
    • Behavioural science evidence syntheses, cluster and network analyses, and machine learning for healthy aging.
  4. 2015–2018

    Earlier roles

    University of Ottawa · Department of National Defence
    • Crisis resource management and stress-inoculation training modules for medical students.
    • Co-authored scientific reports on leadership profiles for senior Canadian Armed Forces positions.

Education

  • Postdoctoral Fellowship

    University of Ottawa · 2023–2024 · Mitacs-Banting Fellow

  • PhD, Psychology

    University of Ottawa · 2019–2023 · CIHR Doctoral Scholarship. Dissertation: Modelling co-occurring and co-varying health behaviours: Applications of machine learning and network psychometrics

  • MBA

    Carleton University · 2017–2019

  • MA, Psychology

    Carleton University · 2014–2016

  • BA, Psychology

    Carleton University · 2009–2014

Methods and tools

Python, R, SQL · LLM evaluation (Inspect, LLM-as-judge validation, inter-rater reliability), retrieval-augmented generation, NLP, open-weight and local models · discrete-event simulation · predictive modelling, multilevel and network models · systematic reviews and meta-analysis · qualitative and mixed methods · implementation science (COM-B, TDF)

Contact

Interested in collaborating?

I'm glad to hear about research partnerships, AI evaluation and applied AI projects, and speaking and workshop invitations.