About Me

I am a third year PhD student within Open Lab at Newcastle University looking into the role that augmented reality can play in radiology. I completed my BSc in computer science here at Newcastle University before starting my PhD in September 2022. Outside of the lab I’m either in the kitchen getting creative with my cooking, or following one of many outdoor pursuits, mostly climbing but also cycling, running, and hiking.

My PhD

In my PhD I am investigating how augmented reality (AR) can be integrated into a medical workflow. I spent the first year of my PhD interviewing various surgeons and radiologists in the North East with the aim of understanding current process and how augmented reality could be integrated with current systems to have a meaningful impact. You can read the written up paper of this study as a pre-print in the publications section. Off the back of this study radiologists were identified as the target user group.

Currently I am exploring the perceptual issues of augmented reality, in particular depth perception. Accurate depth perception is crucial to the effective use of AR in the medical field and beyond, but limitations of modern hardware make this difficult, particularly in the near-field. To investigate this issue I am conducting a literature review to understnad the scope of available literature describing perceptual issues in the near-field and to suggest future areas of research; and I am developing a study using the Microsoft HoloLens 2 to investigate how changing the design of virtual objects affects depth perception in near-field interactions.

My final study will build on these three prior works and aim to provide an indication of if and how AR could be efffectively used by radiologists, and what the advantage of using this technology may be.

Teaching Experience

Along side my PhD I have undertaken some teaching assisstance work helping to support undergraduate and masters modules. One of these modules is the third year undergraduate ‘Human Computer Interaction: Interaction Design’. I have particularly enjoyed demonstrating on this module as it has encouraged me to learn about human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design principles and concepts that I previously had little knowledge of. Engaging with and helping lead the seminars in this module has been particularly rewarding as they provide the opportunity to engage in thought provoking discussions with students.

Over summer 2024 I co-supervised one of the HCI masters students through their dissertation. During this process I engaged with the student to conceptualise their project in line with what they were interested in and the idea they had, all the way through to submission. I found this process particularly rewarding as it afforded me the opportunity to develop an idea with the student and support them in deliverying a high quality piece of work.

Summer Placement - EPiC Research Group, School of Computing - Summer 2022

In the summer of 2022 I completed a summer placement within the EPiC (Educational Practices in Computing) research group in the school of computing at Newcastle University. During this placement I built on existing games development knowledge to create a command line interface simulator for students to use to help them learn basic commands in a safe environment. This was an interesting process that allowed me to build on and solidify my knowledge of command line interfaces. That project is available on the projects page.

Undergraduate

I completed my BSc in computer science here at Newcastle University focussing my final dissertation on the development process of digital twins. During this project I built a digital twin of an F1Tenth car as a case study and employed an introspective approach to suggest guidelines for future digital twin development. This way of thinking was very new to me but it was interesting to experience how a case study can be used to draw wider lessons. I thoroughly enjoyed this project as it introduced me to a field I had no prior experience of and taught me about the potential that digital twins have in many modern systems.