Dr. Dennis Wollersheim
Details
Department: Health and Biomedical Sciences
Campus: Bundoora West Australia
dennis.wollersheim@rmit.edu.au
Open to
- Industry Projects
- Media enquiries
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
About
For forty years — since he was fifteen — Dennis Wollersheim has been pulling apart how computers think. His PhD is in computer science; the degree that shaped how he works is a Bachelor of Social Work. Rigorous about the machine, grounded in the human it serves — that combination runs through everything he builds.
His career sits at the meeting point of data science and health: linking health datasets at La Trobe University, engineering the data behind Victoria's COVID-19 response, and working with health and biomedical research teams at RMIT. Alongside the academic work he is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Real Minds AI, a Melbourne artificial intelligence consultancy that trains professionals to use AI as a genuine collaborator rather than a black box.
His current focus is simple to state and hard to do well: helping researchers and knowledge workers turn large language models into a reliable instrument for thinking, extraction, and discovery.
Research fields
- 4602 Artificial intelligence
- 4611 Machine learning
- 4203 Health services and systems
- 420308 Health informatics and information systems
UN sustainable development goals
- 3 Good Health and Well Being
- 4 Quality Education
- 9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
- 10 Reduced Inequalities
Academic positions
- Senior Research Fellow / Long Covid Data Analyst
- RMIT University
- School of Health and Biomedical Sciences
- Melbourne, Australia
- 1 May 2025 – Present
- Adjunct Lecturer
- La Trobe University
- School of Psychology and Public Health
- Australia
- 1 Jan 2020 – Present
- Senior Lecturer
- La Trobe University
- School of Psychology and Public Health
- Australia
- 1 Jan 2005 – 1 Jan 2020
Non-academic positions
- Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
- Real Minds AI
- Melbourne, Australia
- 30 Sep 2024 – Present
- Principal Analyst
- Victorian Department of Health
- Melbourne, Australia
- 1 Jan 2020 – 1 Jan 2023
Degrees
- Doctoral and Equivalent Level, Computer Science
- La Trobe University
- Australia
- 2000 – 2005
Teaching interests
Dennis teaches the way he works: concrete first, theory second. His teaching spans university health-informatics and electronic-health-records subjects and current professional AI training, where he designs and delivers workshops on using AI — and Claude specifically — as a working tool for analysts, researchers, and knowledge workers.
His philosophy is that AI is a prosthesis for the mind: it levels the playing field, but it takes individual practice to use well. His courses move people from treating AI as a search box to designing the mental space they want to work in — engineering knowledge, not just asking questions. The throughline, in his words: take what you're already smart at, and make it more.
Research interests
- Applied artificial intelligence and large language models in health and biomedical research — including information extraction from free-text clinical and radiology reports
- Health informatics, electronic health records, and health data linkage
- Data science methods for public health and population-health research
- Human–AI collaboration: how researchers and knowledge workers adopt AI as a thinking instrument
- AI fluency and capability building — the practice, not just the theory, of using AI well
