About Me

I am a fourth 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 radiological medical workflows. 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 opportunities around how augmented reality could be integrated with current systems to have a meaningful impact. You can read the paper of this study published in JMIR XR and Spatial Computing in the publications section. Off the back of this study radiologists were identified as the key stakeholders for the remainder of the PhD research.

My second study was a scoping literature review inspired by the medical needs identified but with applications much more broad. This review investigates research around the perceptual challenges of head-mounted displays when interacting with objects in the near-field, or within arm’s reach. In this review the design and interaction techniques on offer to alleviate the impacts of these perceptual issues while working within the capabilities of commercially available head-mounted displays are consolidated. While motivated by healthcare, the insights from this review extend well beyond medicine, offering guidance for the design and integration of AR across a range of fields. This review was published in the MDPI Informatics journal in August 2025, see the publications section for the full paper.

I am currently concluding two parallel studies investigating the impact of AR interactions for clinical radiology and radiological training. FOr this study I am running a series of workshops with radiologists and radiology registrars and using a demo AR application as a prompt to have conversations around the utility and practicality of the interactions the technology provides, while highlighting challenges and opportunities for future development.

Conception X

Alongside the first year of my PhD I participated in the Conception X accelerator program which aims to train PhD students in the entrprenurial skills they may need to convert their research into a deeptech startup. While I was in the early stages of my PhD and had no business idea to develop throughout the program, I gained invaluable skills and made conncetions that will help me in any future direction I take.

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 the summer of 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.