CoSTAR National Lab Doctoral Programme
Get to know the first cohort of CoSTAR National Lab's PhD students
In early October 2025 we welcomed our first cohort of talented CoSTAR National Lab PhD students, to be based across our project partner universities. Charlie Campbell, Hannah Clawson, and Michael Riordan will be based at Royal Holloway, University of London; Arthur Compindubus and Adam Hughes at Abertay University in Dundee; and Arkaprabha Basu and Rishabh Jha at the University of Surrey’s Institute for People-Centred AI.
Left to right: Charlie Campbell, Michael Riordan, Arthur Compindubus, Arkaprabha Basu, Hannah Clawson, Rishabh Jha and Adam HughesThe cohort will be following PhD topic areas closely aligned with the wider CoSTAR National Lab research programmes called ‘Futures’. During their studies they will be addressing key strategic challenges set for us by industry, and will be building strong research connections across these Futures:
Creative Futures takes the best of sector creativity to enable the application of emergent technologies to current and futures opportunities in screen and performance, allowing s
torytelling to reach into the world and help shape our understanding of it.
Business Futures focuses on developing our understanding of ‘life-centric’ experiences for customers, adapted to their ever-changing needs and priorities, and allowing customers to co-create value and personalised services.
AI Futures will embed cutting-edge and foundational AI into creative industry pipelines, helping to transform the creation, production, delivery, and personalised experience of media content, providing more intuitive and creative control.
Createch Futures is seeking rich, distributed and connected interactive virtual environments, advance real-time rendering and simulation in virtual production and associated realtime workflows, optimisation and Generative AI.
User Futures applies the understanding of human factors, human cognition, emotion and user preferences to the creation of inclusive, accessible, intuitive and engaging technologies and experiences of lasting value.
Inclusive Futures explores principles of inclusive innovation and social justice in creative technology for marginalised users, seeking universal accessibility through distributed, democratised, and sustainable advanced production tools and methods.
We'll be following the progress of these talented PhD students as they progress through their studies at CoSTAR, and in the meantime, you can find out more about their extensive experience, interests and accomplishments below.
