Research support for funded projects

Rail resilience research, University of Glasgow

Research Assistant on a funded hub working with ScotRail, Network Rail, the Rail Safety and Standards Board and British Transport Police.

Designed and facilitated simulation-based experiments eliciting behavioural responses under uncertainty across 20 participant sessions, generating both qualitative and quantitative datasets, and collated mixed-methods evaluation data for funder reporting.

Named co-author on two published research outputs.

Humanitarian crisis simulation

Experimental Project Researcher on a wider programme of simulation work. The HOPE AGE crisis simulation, co-facilitated with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, was one part of that role; it involved coordinating digital operations and delivery under acute time pressure.

Ran end-to-end wargames playtesting across multiple sessions with 60 participants, producing strategic recommendations from participant data on coordination breakdown and decision-making under incomplete information.

60 participants, multiple sessions, recommendations delivered.

Counter-radicalisation policy simulation

Designed and adjudicated a two-scenario, four-turn stakeholder simulation across six institutional and community actors, coding 39 adjudicated decisions into a structured dataset with binary thematic flags.

Built reproducible derived metrics with explicit decision rules, then separated outcomes driven by intervention quality from those driven by chance, and stated the small-sample limitations rather than overclaiming.

Directional inference, honestly bounded.

Al-Qaeda's influence on European policy and international relations

A research paper on how one organisation reshaped the security architecture of a continent. It traces the group from its 1988 origins in the Soviet-Afghan war, sets out the intellectual sources its leadership drew on, and follows the policy consequences of the Madrid bombings of March 2004, the London attacks of July 2005 and the Paris attacks of November 2015.

Maps what changed in response: the EU Counterterrorism Strategy and its Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Respond pillars, the UK CONTEST framework, the Internal Security Strategy of 2010 and its 2015 renewal, the European Arrest Warrant, the first invocation of NATO Article 5, and the terrorist-financing controls extended to informal transfer systems.

The argument is that the second-order effects matter as much as the attacks. Counterterrorism powers were bought at a cost to civil liberties, tested repeatedly in Strasbourg and in the domestic courts; racial profiling followed the Madrid response; far-right extremism drew far less attention and resource than jihadist violence despite a comparable body count in some years; and the resulting suspicion of Muslim communities in Europe damaged exactly the social cohesion that counterterrorism policy claimed to defend.

Treats terrorism as a catalyst for political change, not only as a source of violence.

Democratisation, statebuilding and civil society in Ghana

A solo research presentation tracing Ghana's route to democratic rule: independence in 1957, the droughts and the expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria in 1983, structural adjustment alongside democratisation after 1989, the 1992 constitution and the Fourth Republic, and the 2012 handover that followed a president's death in office.

Assessed the state of the settlement against evidence rather than reputation: women holding 13.1 per cent of legislative seats, and Ghana 100th of 146 countries on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index; youth unemployment and the finding that four in ten Ghanaians have considered emigrating; declining trust in the chieftaincy, judiciary, executive and legislature; and uneven development between north and south.

Mapped Ghanaian civil society organisations and their record in practice, including the Committee of Eminent Chiefs in the Dagbon settlement and the youth and women's associations working across the Bawku divide.

Built from Afrobarometer, World Economic Forum and peer-reviewed sources.

Africa's space frontier: the African Space Agency and Ghana

Traced Ghana's space sector from the founding of the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute in 2012, through GhanaSat-1, built by All Nations University College students and deployed in orbit on 7 July 2017, to the National Space Policy launched in November 2024. Assessed what the sector has actually delivered: coastal and illegal-mining monitoring, rural broadband, and satellite data for agriculture and resource management.

Examined the African Space Agency as the channel for international collaboration, including the GMES and Africa programme spanning more than 170 institutions across 45 countries, and the institute's memorandum of understanding with the SatCom Industry Association of India.

The analytical contribution was a gap nobody had flagged. Neither the African Space Policy nor Ghana's National Space Policy contains provisions for space debris mitigation, while NASA, UNOOSA and the European Space Agency have built frameworks for exactly that. The recommendation was partnership rather than duplication, alongside a candid treatment of funding constraints and the sovereignty risk that comes with donor-controlled research.

Identified an unaddressed debris-mitigation gap in both the continental and national policies.

Anti-vaccine narrative networks

The team built a 933-node, 1,343-edge interaction network in Gephi, ran modularity-based community detection at 0.897 and isolated four distinct geographic clusters.

Accounts were ranked by degree, eigenvector and betweenness centrality, then that ranking was tested against qualitative profiling, establishing that centrality alone overstates influence without narrative context.

My part: I ran the analysis in Gephi, building the network and producing the community detection and centrality measures the team's conclusions rested on. I was one of two members who presented the work.

Findings presented to an academic and policy audience.

Political interference in the Bawku chieftaincy conflict

A policy brief addressed to the Government of Ghana, produced as a group coursework project. It traces seventy years of national party competition mapped onto the Kusasi and Mamprusi chieftaincy dispute, from the CPP and UP alignment of 1957 through to the December 2024 general election, where one party recorded zero votes across twenty Bawku polling stations.

Evidence was assembled from academic literature, Ghanaian legislation and decrees, NGO conflict reporting and contemporaneous news sources, with a conflict timeline and an institutional map of the traditional court system annexed.

My part: everything other than the context and problem sections, which the other member wrote. That means the historical and electoral analysis, the conflict timeline, the recommendations, and the editing of the brief as a whole. I was one of two presenters.

Recommendation: mediation through the National House of Chiefs rather than the courts.