Hannah Bunt

PhD topic: Using large language models to surface unknown problems in consumer complaints

PhD Supervisors: Professor Alex Gillespie and Dr Tom Reader

Hannah Bunt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE, and a PhD affiliate with LSE's Data Science Institute. Her doctoral research uses large language models (LLMs) to analyse consumer complaints at scale. It tackles a particular challenge: among millions of complaints, some problems are ones nobody has yet thought to look for. Hannah's PhD aims to develop methods that move beyond confirming known patterns toward discovery of unknown problems, and to establish what validation of these methods requires.

Prior to her PhD, Hannah worked as a researcher at LSE on projects spanning organisational culture, public trust in science, and online communication, including consultancy work analysing large-scale text data for organisations. She teaches Natural Language Processing to undergraduate students at the London Interdisciplinary School, and delivers training on using LLMs for text classification to postgraduate students.

Hannah holds an MSc in Social and Public Communication from LSE, where she received the Hilde Himmelweit Award for Best Overall Performance. She also holds a BASc in Arts and Sciences from University College London (UCL) with First-class Honours. Her broader research interests encompass social and organisational psychology, communication, qualitative and computational text analysis, meta-psychology, and research methodology.