Visualise Your Thesis Competition

This thesis presents an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) study of former prisoner's experiences of school exclusion and trajectories into offending and imprisonment. All participants were Black Caribbean men who received SEN support during their schooling and experienced a form of alternative provision post-exclusion. Three rounds of semi-structured interviews were conducted with four participants to gather rich accounts of their life experiences, with each interview focusing on a specific part of their life histories: schooling, offending and prison. Consequent to participants' difficulty fitting into mainstream education, where SEN support was typically inadequate, there was a unanimous sense of relief from being permanently excluded. The participants acknowledged that this event was a critical turning point in their lives that contributed to their exposure to crime, sharing their challenges and difficulties with alternative provision, which was typically viewed negatively and likened to prison because of the restrictive and punitive environment. Growing up as one of the only Black pupils in their schools and neighbourhoods, racism and discrimination were a regular part of their early lives. As they grew older and interacted with police and prison officers, they appeared to accept and normalise this without challenge. This study provides key stakeholders with best practice and recommendations to support Black Caribbean pupils permanently excluded from school to help prevent a school-to-prison-pipeline from occurring. 

This visual illustrates the results of a controlled experiment conducted using a 77–81 GHz mmWave radar, where the goal was to evaluate how well the radar detects a known metallic target (corner reflector) at varying distances indoors. The experiment captures the difference between theoretical expectations and real-world radar detection, with a focus on how distance impacts reliability.

The graph shows measured detection strength compared to a scaled theoretical curve derived from the radar range equation. It highlights a critical threshold — the transition from the near-field zone, where signal reflections are chaotic and produce ghost targets, to the far-field zone, where detection becomes accurate and stable. Ghost targets (false reflections) were observed predominantly within 1.5 meters and are marked on the plot.

The results confirm that even in controlled indoor settings, radar performance is influenced by complex propagation effects not always captured in theoretical models. This insight is vital for designing indoor tracking systems using mmWave radar, where accurate detections at close range are often required.

Commercial surrogacy in the Global South continues through ethical blind spots: the subaltern surrogate’s womb functions as a reproductive unit, a commodity for the world market. The academic literature on commercial surrogacy is replete with Orientalist tropes of non-agential, oppressed and poor women and cosmopolitan commissioning parents who liberate them. A salvific discourse of development and solidarity is dominant. Some of the most innovative technologies at the frontier of medical knowledge are deployed in a regime of biopolitical extraction. The subaltern woman in the Global South is rendered invisible whenever medico-legal knowledge and policy interventions shape current ‘ethical’ guidelines for practitioners in this field. Although India banned commercial surrogacy in 2015, assisted reproductive technologies (ART) remain unregulated and many of the exploitative relations between capital interests and subaltern bodies for India’s poorest classes in the fifth largest economy in the world have now been replicated in the market for gestational workers. My thesis is submitting knowledge production, including critiques by transnational feminists, to a systematic decolonising analysis of racialized, ethnicized reproductive labour from a subaltern perspective.

The photograph captures real interaction between a full-sized elephant costume among uniformed soldiers in a social space — a Warrant Officers’ and Sergeants’ Mess – the soldiers’ indifference to the elephant’s presence demonstrates a striking dissonance, which highlights that which is seen but not addressed—the complex emotional choreography of action, avoidance, normalisation, and silence. The juxtaposition between the out-of-place costume and the composed, neutral body language of the soldiers highlights a tension between the visible and the unspoken. The elephant, nicknamed “Ray Sysm,” is used in live sessions with military teams to disrupt space and invite honest discussion. Rather than solely relying on formal presentations or training scripts, this visual metaphor sparks emotional and personal responses. It asks: What are we not noticing and not talking about? One soldier’s story made headlines in 2024 when years of racist bullying were ignored until she captured it on tape. Her complaints were initially dismissed as “banter” until she provided recorded proof, illustrating a culture of denial and belated action. Bourabain et al defines everyday racism as “invisible but intrusive,” sustained by collective silence and denial (Bourabain et al, 2021). The elephant, simultaneously unsettling and comical, stirs curiosity, becoming a catalyst for a different approach to tackling racism, institutional culture, and systemic silence by disrupting routine scenes in military spaces. Elephant in the Room as a methodology utilises curiosity, among other social experiments, to encourage grassroots discussions amongst soldiers of all ranks, and is aimed at generating positive action.

This image supports my doctoral research, which explores how femininity is expressed, interpreted, and negotiated by women working in Russell Group universities. These institutions hold significant cultural capital and play a central role in shaping what is seen as professional, respectable, and legitimate in academic life. In this context, femininity is never neutral. It is read and judged through the lenses of class, race, and institutional power. In the drawing, the central figure wears a necklace with the letter F, representing both femininity and force. Around her are women with a range of appearances, including those who do not fit narrow or conventional ideas of what it means to be feminine. One woman is shown ascending an academic ladder, her profile turned away, suggesting ambition, movement, and the solitary nature of striving for academic success. Symbols such as lipstick, a university building, a laptop, the phrase "Head of Department" at the top of an academic ladder, and a crossed-out glass ceiling reflect the expectations and contradictions that many women face in academic settings. My research uses qualitative interviews and thematic analysis to explore how women navigate these expectations. It considers how femininity is both constrained and strategically expressed in academic spaces shaped by class and prestige. The image invites the viewer to reflect on the politics of appearance and identity in universities and to consider who decides what is seen as credible, powerful, or professional.

Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) have become a pertinent subject in engineering with the widespread development of autonomous systems. Autonomous systems leverage the advanced control algorithms enabled by high-speed computers to achieve challenging tasks under environmental perturbations. Surface vessels are known for their seaborne operations under high levels of perturbations that induce severe impacts on occupants. This thesis presents the work carried out in the development of a series of control strategies for ensuring performance in two aspects of autonomous vessel motion control: seakeeping and manoeuvring. This thesis focuses on controlling the motion of fast surface vessels to alleviate the impacts due to forces transferred onto vessel hulls from sea waves. A series of control strategies applied on a fast USV for ensuring performance in two aspects of autonomous vessel motion control, seakeeping and manoeuvring, are presented henceforth. Complementary to seakeeping, vessel performance is often also analysed based on manoeuvring theory. Manoeuvring theory involves generalising the behaviour of a vessel moving through calm water without waves by giving attention to examining its ability to maintain the heading and to track pre-defined trajectories, i.e. course keeping. In the first phase of the research, the tests are carried out using a computer simulation. In the second phase, the successful control strategies in the simulation environment are applied to a real USV.

The simple fern. A common site across Britain, and indeed the world, many of us pass these little plants by. So why, in the nineteenth century, was everyone so enthusiastic about ferns? And why am I, in 2025, following in the footsteps of my Victorian “fern ladies” and hunting for ferns? My thesis considers the contributions of women to the study and culture of ferns across the long nineteenth century. Women have traditionally been associated with pteridomania, the culture of ferns, as opposed to pteridology, the study of ferns. My thesis seeks to rehabilitate their scientific and cultural contributions, arguing that women made significant contributions to both. By considering less traditionally “scientific” methods of production such as popular fern guides, scientific illustration, personal fern collections, specimen collections for scientific institutions like Kew, fern album production and early forms of photography I seek to rehabilitate the important work of women pteridologists. It was while reading these popular fern books that I became inspired to take notice of the ferns around me. Popular fern guides from the 1840s to 1880s provide details of the ferns of Britain, their characteristics, facts about them and where to find them. These women were incredibly passionate about ferns and about sharing this knowledge with their readers. When I spend all day reading about ferns through this lens, I couldn’t help but become interested myself. Perhaps in a small way, taking notice of the ferns around me connects me to these women working almost 200 years ago. 

This image illustrates how people experience indoor thermal comfort in tropical low-income housing. It compares two common dwelling types in a low-income community in southern Nigeria. The Earth dwellings are made from mud, while Makeshift dwellings are constructed from salvaged materials such as wood and plastic. The photographs are paired with graphs showing indoor temperature patterns and how residents felt in those conditions over the course of a year. The research explores whether international adaptive thermal comfort standards such as the European (EN 16798) and American (ASHRAE 55) models accurately reflect the realities of living in hot, humid, low-income environments. While both dwelling types often exceeded the temperature limits set by these standards, many residents still reported feeling comfortable, particularly in Earth dwellings. The findings highlight how people adapt to heat in different types of housing, and how comfort is influenced not only by temperature but also by building materials and residents’ expectations. This informed the development of a locally adapted thermal comfort model which showed that residents exhibit greater tolerance to warmer indoor conditions than global benchmarks suggest. Aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), this research advocates for locally relevant housing design and policies that promote occupant well-being, resilience, and equity in climate-vulnerable communities.

My research uses a molecular technology called a “base editor” that can precisely change single letters (bases) in the genetic code of DNA.  By using this technology in Xenopus frogs, this allows us to recreate the genetic changes that cause rare genetic disease in humans and learn more about them. Specifically, I focus on understanding a neurological disorder caused by changes to the gene PURA. PURA syndrome affects the nervous system, causing developmental delays and intellectual disabilities. Here, I use green colouring to symbolise these genetic changes. The base editor is injected into a single-cell frog embryo, but the cells divide faster than the editor can work, so only some cells are successfully edited. This produces mosaically edited embryos with both edited and unedited cells. We can study these edited embryos by asking how well they survive as they develop into tadpoles and by using mRNA to identify how different cell types form. We can assess how the edited tadpoles "look" and "behave" to help us understand what changes happen in diseases. For example, we can measure tadpole head sizes to get an idea of their brain development. We can also let them explore mazes: the decisions they make tell us whether their working memory has been altered, which indicates how the genetic change affects brain function and memory. We can breed our mosaic adult frogs, producing offspring that are either unaffected or edited. These tadpoles can be studied further to support the mosaic animal data and test potential therapies. 

Our mouth is home to a community of bacteria, known as the oral microbiome. This plays a vital role in supporting cardiovascular health. My research explores how mouth bacteria convert dietary nitrate (from foods like leafy greens) into nitrite, which is then transformed into nitric oxide (NO). The NO is crucial for relaxing blood vessels, regulating blood pressure and arterial function. However, chlorhexidine (CHX) mouthwash is commonly prescribed in dental care for gum disease (periodontal disease) as an adjunct to the deep gum treatment, and is also available over the counter (OTC). This CHX mouthwash disrupts this beneficial NO cycle and can destroy the helpful nitrate-reducing bacteria in the mouth. Thus, impairing the nitrate–nitrite–NO pathway and potentially increasing blood pressure. This randomised, double-blind, crossover study investigates the short-term effects of different CHX concentrations (0.05%, 0.12%, and 0.2%) on nitrate-reducing capacity, salivary amylase enzyme, and vascular function in healthy adults. A unique arm includes 0.2% CHX combined with potassium nitrate to test for protective effects. We measure changes in salivary nitrate/nitrite, α-amylase, pH, glucose, lactate, blood pressure, and endothelial function of the brachial artery using ultrasound. This short study will be followed by a larger trial in individuals with periodontal disease. Out of 35 participants (sample size), to date, 25 participants have been recruited, and nine have completed all five study visits. Early data suggest that CHX may dose-dependently impair oral microbiome and vascular function by disrupting the NO link between the mouth and the cardiovascular system.

I use abuse victim testimonies to inform the characters on my fantasy fiction novel. By taking challenging true stories and retelling them through fantasy worlds and mythical monsters, a distance is created between this difficult subject and readers, allowing for a wider public discussion. This image is a visualisation of the following testimony from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (Jaye), 2022, p.31. “Some victims and survivors experienced violence at the hands of their parents. Eva described her family as seemingly “respectable and middle class”, but at home her father physically abused her from a young age. She recalled trying to stay awake at night with her back against her bedroom door, as she believed that her father might kill her”.

Think this is a bottle? Not yet. These colourful preforms are what your Coca-Cola bottle looks like before it’s blown into shape. Made from recycled PET, their colours aren’t just pretty, they tell a story. Clearer preforms come from cleaner plastic waste. Murkier shades? That’s mixed, dirtier recycling streams at work.