Greta (Guo) Chen started her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in January 2025. With a background in user experience design and urban planning, her research focuses on how communities can collaboratively create locative narratives to reflect their lived experiences and reimagine local places, and how these practices foster everyday heritage-making and support community wellbeing.

Thomai Papadopoulou started her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in October 2025. Her research on Systems Storytelling of Digital Decarbonisation recognises that while digital technologies can help the promotion of sustainability, for example by reducing deforestation when we replace paper documents with digital ones, yet they come with an environmental cost. Digital decarbonisation, is a term born in Loughborough University, and refers to the mitigation of carbon emissions emitted from the use of digital technologies and activities, involving many sectors, stakeholders, tensions, dilemmas and conflicting goals. The purpose of Thomai’s research is to understand and frame the current predicaments surrounding this complex system. You can find out more at: Loughborough Business School | Loughborough University

Stephanie (Yao) Gou started her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in January 2023. Funded through InterAct, Stephanie’s research is focused on how digital storytelling could support the innovation and diffusion of digital technologies that will result in stronger, more resilient UK manufacturing industry. Prior to joining academia, Stephanie was a CIMA qualified, project accountant with experiences in organisational changes. She is also a school governor, a children’s book translator, a cultural columnist of Chinese airlines’ in-flight magazines and a contributor to Chinese children’s literature magazines. Stephanie is interested in cross-cultural communication, dual-identity education and interdisciplinary research.

Zitao Zhou (TAO) started her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in January 2023, with funding from the InterAct Network. She is a researcher and digital media artist. With a rich background in film, animation, and game creation, she approaches diverse media as pathways for exploring the world and generating knowledge—ultimately in service of understanding humanity and our entanglements with material environments. Her PhD research employs digital storytelling to examine inclusivity through an intersectional gender lens, co-creating both documentary-style and AI-generated short films with participants. The project focuses on the lived experiences of women in manufacturing, highlighting vulnerability, resilience, and the material dimensions of inclusive ecosystems embedded in everyday life.

Fiona Hughes began her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in October 2023. Fiona has a background in the private (engineering, IT services, telecoms, finance) and public (NHS/LA/Education) sectors from both technical and business perspectives. She also has longstanding wellbeing, creative and storytelling practices – teaching, writing and publishing books, songs and musicals under pen names. Fiona’s research ‘The Power of The Musical’ explores the potential for musical theatre to influence young people in terms of their sense of self and the lens through which they view the world, with focus on empowerment, wellbeing and gender.

Danielle Vaughan started her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in October 2023. Danielle is a recycling artist. Her default position is sharing how to turn trash into treasure to benefit our very needy planet. Her primary medium for running workshops and creating portraits is paper, which, when ripped, elicits comments about its therapeutic qualities. This phenomenon leads her to enquire how people narrate the mental health & wellbeing benefits of ripping paper as a starting point for her research.

Ananya Gupta began her part time PhD in October 2022. Her research is focused on understanding structures of inequalities in technology workspaces through an intersectional lens. Her background is in financial services, working primarily in product management & information architecture.

Elizabeth Jane Lovely started her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in October 2021.
Elizabeth’s research is focused on somatic experiences of enchantment from a storytelling in the oral tradition perspective. Her particular interest in this area is how a specifically created animistic form of Story-Speaking might be of support to a person at the moment of their death. Her research asks how a restoryed approach to dying might offer comfort and invoke a sense of home whilst addressing our fears of the unknown. She is particularly intrigued by the notion of practice from the liminal spaces of blurred boundaries, and how domestic folk healing might offer up alternative and valid forms of knowledge gathering.

Jennifer Stuttle started her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in October 2021. Jennifer’s research is focused on exploring the impact of applied storytelling on academic attainment and wellbeing in secondary education.

Lucy McLaughlin started her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in October 2020. Lucy’s research explores the use of stop motion animation as a tool to develop young people’s mental health literacy.

Prudhvi Kumar Chowdary‘s interests and expertise include Indian Oral Traditions and Storytelling , Literary Theory and Criticism, Performance Arts, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, Sociology, and Indian literature. His research focuses on Fortune Telling: Indian Oral Traditions and Storytelling of the selected Indian tribes and communities. Prudhvi’s personal motto is “Grow as you go”.

Now Doctors!

Holly Turpin (now Dr Turpin) started her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in July 2021 as part of the HOME Centre for Doctoral Training. Holly’s research is focused on narrative enquiry through immersive digital storytelling and co-creation. She is exploring different material and immaterial experiences of losing one’s home and how this relates to identity, memory and heritage.

Karen Sung (now Dr Sung) started her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in October 2020. Under the Storytelling Academy’s guidance, Karen’s research focuses on finding the lost voices of marginalized Korean Diasporas – those of Lai Dai Han to be specific, and using comics narrative to tell the stories. 

Terrie Howey (now Dr Howey) began her PhD in September 2016. Her research is on applied storytelling and heritage, specifically in Milton Keynes. Terrie has a practical background, working on community projects and education in school.

Ngozi Oparah (now Dr Oparah) started her PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in October 2020. Ngozi’s research is focused on interactive, fictionalized narratives and animation as tools towards improved mental health literacy in youth. 

Sam West (now Dr West) started his PhD in the School of Design and Creative Arts in October 2019. Funded through the Storytelling Academy, Sam’s research is focused on applied storytelling in independent professional wrestling. Sam is uncovering the hidden knowledge of theatrical wrestling to understand how performers use physical movement and vocalisation to tell stories. He is also exploring the unique ways that wrestling incorporates digital technology, such as social media, to extent stories beyond live performance into the wider world.

Kristina Gavran (now Dr Gavran) started her PhD in September 2017 and is currently working on a fascinating project on True Life Storytelling.