Our Research | MINDS CDT | University of Southampton

Our researchers

MINDS researchers have gone on to postdoctoral positions, industry roles and enterprise activity across the AI and electronics sectors. Their profiles below give a picture of the range of research carried out through the CDT and the paths it has opened up.

Olaf Lipinski

MINDS alumnus. Researched how AI agents develop languages from scratch, focusing on how they communicate about time. Now Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Visa and Visiting Fellow at Southampton.

Charles Hutchins

MINDS alumnus. PhD research in drone network cybersecurity. Alan Turing Institute placement. Now Knowledge Exchange and Enterprise Fellow at Southampton.

Matthew Pugh

MINDS alumnus. PhD research built a mathematical theory of machine learning using category theory. Now Research Associate at Cambridge working on AI that writes mathematical proofs.

William Hunt

Doctoral researcher working on how people interact with swarms of autonomous robots, developing interfaces and control methods to help a single operator oversee many robots at once. Due to graduate 2026.

Xander Lowe

Doctoral researcher combining electrophysiology and computational brain modelling to understand short-term memory, with implications for neurological conditions and low-energy AI hardware. Due to graduate 2027.

Keniel Peart

Doctoral researcher developing AI systems for sign language recognition from video and radar signals, with applications in assistive communication and privacy-preserving sensing. Due to graduate 2027.

Oliver Grainge

Doctoral researcher developing techniques to compress visual AI systems so robots and drones can navigate without GPS on low-power hardware. Due to graduate 2026.

Kieran Maguire

Doctoral researcher studying how network structure affects the way recommendation systems learn, with implications for the fairness and accuracy of online recommendations. Due to graduate 2026.

Xiyue Fan

Doctoral researcher training transformer models on purely symbolic data to solve differential equations, aiming for solutions with better generalisation than existing numerical approaches. Due to graduate 2027.

Michael Rontionov

Doctoral researcher building compiler tools to bridge the gap between neuromorphic algorithms and real hardware, including the NIR2FPGA compilation tool. Due to graduate 2028.

Balint Gucsi

Doctoral researcher developing user-aware decision making frameworks for social robots, allowing them to adapt to individual preferences and reduce frustration in real-time interactions. Due to graduate 2026.