"Surrey has given me lots of opportunities. In my final year as a BSc student I was a lab demonstrator – helping first year students with their lab exercises – and got involved in the Department of Computing’s Mentor Scheme. I also spent a summer research placement contributing to a project focused on rail safety systems, which gave me a flavour for what a career in academia would involve and helped me to decide what I wanted to do in the future.

I’m now continuing my studies at Surrey with an industrially-sponsored PhD in cyber security: an area of computing I am passionate about. My PhD work involves doing security protocol analysis of future connected communicating cars in Intelligent Transportation Systems.

One of my aims in completing a PhD was to learn all the core skills needed to be an independent researcher. To date I have already had one joint paper published with researchers in the Netherlands and Germany, and I’m currently writing up another publication.”

"During my PhD, I looked at different automated and semi-automated computational approaches for verbal deception detection, taking into account issues like online grooming, author identification and plagiarism detection.

I’m now co-founder, co-director and CEO of Securium Ltd, a spin-off from the University’s Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, working on developing innovative products and services to protect vulnerable people from unsavoury activities online such as child sexual grooming, radicalisation, and romance fraud. Our work has been honoured with the Home Office International Crime and Policing Conference award for ‘the most potential to inform thinking about how to prevent crime’. In addition, I was recently endorsed by the Home Office as an exceptional talent in the fields of natural language processing, cyber security and data sciences.”

“My PhD revolves around deep learning and how we can use it to diagnose and evaluate the treatment of epileptic patients. While deep learning is most often associated with achieving high accuracy predictions, it can also offer meaningful insights from data. My aim has been to further understand these biologically-inspired models – also known as neural networks – and use them as a qualitative measure to assist clinicians both in their initial diagnosis, and for ongoing treatment, of epileptic patients.

One of the best things about studying at Surrey is the friendly environment within the Department of Computer Science. Staff treat research students as peers, and openly discuss research opportunities.

When I finish my postgraduate studies at Surrey I’d like to enter industry in a research and development role, applying all that I’ve learned. In the long-term, I’d like to see the methodologies I’ve developed introduced within the healthcare industry."