Doctoral research

Student: Timipado Silikowei-Imomotebegha
Supervisors: Dr Elizabeth Ratcliffe and Dr Laura Justham 
School: Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Funding source: School scholarship, Inclusive Engineering Excellence Hub 

Timipado is researching computational empathy, technical AI governance and AI safety within human-AI relationships.

Her aim is to build personality-aware AI mentorship systems for early career women in STEM, and develop behavioural evaluation methodologies for relationship-forming AI and privacy-preserving infrastructure for intimate AI systems.

Her interdisciplinary work bridges cognitive science, machine learning and responsible AI frameworks to establish evaluation methodologies applicable to broader AI safety challenges.

Alongside her PhD research, Timipado is a Data Science Facilitator in Defence and Data Science with The Alan Turing Institute. This role sees her touring UK universities to talk to students about careers in data science and defence.

Student: Nada Yusuf 
Supervisors: Dr Laura Justham and Dr Elizabeth Ratcliffe 
School: Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Funding source: School Scholarship, Inclusive Engineering Excellence Hub 

Nada is investigating the current inclusive placement and employment strategies within UK engineering that are designed to recruit a diverse cohort of engineering graduates.

By focusing on gender, race, ethnicity, disability, neurodiversity and socio-economic factors, her research is dissecting how identity affects the career outcomes of engineering graduates.

Using a mixed-methods approach - including policy analysis, surveys and participatory workshops - she is examining discipline-specific factors across engineering sectors.

Nada's co-creation-based methodology will ensure that universities, industry and students collaborate to develop interventions that drive transformational change, inform strategies and policies, ultimately helping to diversifying the future UK engineering workforce.

Student: Sona Hashempour
Supervisors: Dr Elizabeth Ratcliffe and Professor Karen Coopman 
School: Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Funding source: Inclusive Engineering Vice Chancellor’s Research Cluster Scholarship 

Cross-national empirical evidence on how wealth inequality interacts with educational access and gender parity remains fragmented. Global datasets vary in coverage, comparability and temporal resolution, constraining longitudinal analysis.

Sona is creating harmonised, SDG-aligned data structures capable of revealing systemic relationships between inequality trajectories and educational outcomes. By integrating quantitative inequality metrics with indicators of educational participation and attainment, she is building causal and predictive modelling using econometric and machine learning methods for analysing educational equity.

Student: Donna Otchere
Supervisors: Professor Ksenia Chmutina and Prof Sheryl Williams 
School: Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Funding source: School scholarship, Inclusive Engineering Excellence Hub 

Donna is investigating the impact of role models by evaluating the barriers and enablers for under-represented girls’ access. To garner insight from students, educators and role models, she is using mixed methods approaches.

By assessing the effectiveness of strategies, she will design educational games integrating role models and engineering career exploration.

Meanwhile, she is facilitating collaboration between educators and role models to implement these strategies and assess their impact on girls’ attitudes towards engineering disciplines and career pathways.

Student: Msafiri Ngololo
Supervisors: Dr Laura Justham and Dr Elizabeth Ratcliffe 
School: Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Funding source: Inclusive Engineering Vice Chancellor’s Research Cluster Scholarship 

By analysing lived experiences, Msafiri is examining how physical and digital environments enable or restrict inclusion, empowerment and resilience for people with mobility and visual impairments.

Through the co-creation of evidence‑based recommendations and evaluation of how the design, development and implementation of innovative accessible technologies and inclusive smart systems, he is building strategies to better support inclusion, empowerment and resilience.​

His research is aligned with disability inclusive development, accessibility and disaster risk reduction frameworks in Tanzania and across Africa.

Student: Joshua Collinson
Supervisors: Professor Sheryl Williams and Dr Elizabeth Ratcliffe 
School: Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Funding source: Inclusive Engineering Vice Chancellor’s Research Cluster Scholarship 

Joshua is investigating the integration of assistive technology (AT) into extended reality (XR) and how assistive products can be combined with XR to expand access to engineering education across multiple disciplines.

He is examining contemporary inclusive practices and the integration of new assistive products to facilitate greater interaction options for people with physical disabilities. Alongside this, he is exploring the integration of large language models (LLM) as an assistive technology in immersive learning environments, where it can support the communication and accessibility of people with diverse cognitive needs.

By evaluating the technical feasibility and pedagogical value of his approach, he will develop best practice that reduces barriers for learners across engineering disciplines. 

Student: Laurene Marquesane-Oliveira-Da-Silva
Supervisors: Dr Elizabeth Ratcliffe and Professor Catherine Armstrong 
School: Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Funding source: Inclusive Engineering Vice Chancellor’s Research Cluster Scholarship 

Though well established in sociology, law and gender studies, considerations of intersectionality remain limited in engineering. Laurene is plugging this gap by advancing the integration of intersectionality into empirical analysis of UK engineering education and careers.

She is developing an Intersectional Disadvantage Model (IDM), a mixed-methods framework designed to combine large-scale quantitative modelling with qualitative exploration of lived experiences. This will quantify and interpret compounded gender, race and class impacts on early-career trajectories among under-represented UK engineers.

Her research will examine how multiple axes of inequality intersect to shape both structural outcomes and everyday professional realities - underpinning the development of a Contextual Intersectional Framework (CIF) to adapt intersectionality to the UK context.

Student: Shivani Sud
Supervisors: Dr Elizabeth Ratcliffe and Professor Catherine Armstrong 
School: Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Funding source: Inclusive Engineering Vice Chancellor’s Research Cluster Scholarship 

Shivani is investigating science capital as unique experiential resources and funds of knowledge cultivated within underprivileged groups by their experience of intersectional challenges and systemic disadvantage. Her findings will act as a foundation for inclusive engineering competencies.

She will explore a variety of related questions, including:

What if the seeds of engineering skills and knowledge are pervasively planted within disadvantaged groups precisely by the systems which disadvantage them?

In which fields are these funds legitimated as capital?

Using a combination of interviews and storytelling techniques, she will capture the lived experiences of IE role models and pre-engineers. This will support the design of a framework that will cultivate an ecosystem of support for IE recognition in engineering.

Her cross-thematic analysis will construct exemplars of IE career pathways, by scrutinising societal gain and collective capital as well as experiential resources as the foundations for globally responsible competencies as IE identity.