Deep Discoveries Team

For general inquiries about the project, please email The National Archives' Research team at research@nationalarchives.gov.uk.


Lora Angelova, Project PI
Head of Conservation Research and Audience Development, The National Archives

Lora Angelova is Head of Conservation Research and Audience Development in the Collection Care Department of The National Archives. She is responsible for coordinating and leading a wide-range of scientific and conservation research projects, engagement activities with public and academic audiences, and supporting the wider archives conservation and heritage science research sector. Lora is a heritage scientist with a PhD chemistry and conservation research from Georgetown University and the National Gallery, DC. Prior to joining The National Archives, she was a researcher on the Nanorestart project at Tate, and a Newton Fellow at UCL and the University of Cambridge.


John Collomosse, Project CI
Professor of Computer Vision, University of Surrey
John Collomosse is a Professor of Computer Vision at the Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), one the UK's largest academic research groups for Artificial Intelligence with over 150 researchers. John is a Visiting Professor at Adobe Research, Creative Intelligence Lab (San Jose, CA).  John joined CVSSP in 2009.  Previously he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Bath where he completed his PhD in 2004 on the topic of AI for Image Stylization.

Robert Cubey, Project CI
Plant Records Officer at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Robert Cubey is Plant Records Officer of the RBGE, handling the data management for both the Living and Herbarium collections. This includes the provision of data to the RBGE online catalogues as well as providing data to numerous external data partners. He maps the Living Collections of the RBGE across all four of its sites and is developing tools for the RBGE staff to use this data. He is interested in how technology can be used to improve the visitor experience to RBGE, and how it can improve productivity in the horticultural department. He also works on information workflows within the RBGE herbarium, looking at how software and hardware can help make the information held within the 3 million herbarium sheets more accessible.

Joanna Norman, Project CI
Director of the V&A Research Institute
Joanna Norman is Director of the V&A Research Institute. She is an early modern historian with a curatorial background, with projects including exhibitions (Baroque, V&A 2009 and Treasures from Budapest, Royal Academy of Arts 2010), media collaborations (Handmade in Britain, V&A/BBC4 2011-12), permanent gallery redevelopments (Europe 1600–1815, V&A 2015) and new museums (the Scottish Design Galleries at V&A Dundee, opened 2018).  As Director of VARI she is responsible for the V&A's research projects and outputs, academic partnerships and postgraduate programmes.

Pip Willcox, Project CI
Head of Research, The National Archives
Pip is Head of Research at The National Archives. She has a background in digital editing and book history, focussing first on encoding medieval manuscripts and later on early modern printed books. More recently she has worked on projects linking collections and semantic web technologies, and social machines. Before joining The National Archives, Pip spent 13 years at the University of Oxford. She led the University's Centre for Digital Scholarship since establishing it in 2015, and worked with colleagues in Humanities to develop a research-led Master's programme in Digital Humanities. She directed the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School and was a Senior Researcher at the Oxford e-Research Centre.

Rachel Smillie, Project Administrator
Head of Academic Partnerships, The National Archives
Rachel is Head of Academic Partnerships at The National Archives and leads the Academic Engagement Team. This team enables collaborative research across organisations, and works to connect academic and heritage research audiences with the expertise, collections and resources at The National Archives. Rachel holds a PhD from the University of Aberdeen and, before joining The National Archives, worked extensively in the higher education sector in both academic and administrative roles.

Dipu Manandhar, Project Researcher
Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Surrey
Dipu obtained a PhD from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where his work was related to visual search. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher working with Professor John Collomosse at CVSSP Lab, University of Surrey, where he works with graphic UI design layout modelling and visual search tasks.

Jack Craig, Project Researcher
Digital Design Lead V&A
Jack is digital design lead at the V&A museum. He has over 10 years experience working in digital for organisations in the public and private sector including the UK Parliament, Wellcome Trust and the London Evening Standard. He has a focus on designing user-centered and inclusive digital experiences.

Zoe Hendon and Sian Woodward
Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA), Middlesex University
Zoe Hendon is Head of Collections and Sian Woodward is Collections Manager at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture. Their approach is one of openness to new ways of working with digital and online tools, in order to make the collections widely accessible to new audiences.

Hari Chandrapal
User Researcher, The National Archives
Hari Chandrapal worked with software applications in the Intellectual Property Management sector for 16 years in a variety of roles which created a curiosity around user centred design and human behaviour. This led her to complete an MSc in Human Computer Interaction Design at City University, London and she now works as a User Researcher in ‘Digital Services’ at The National Archives.

Bernard Ogden
Research Software Engineer, The National Archives
Bernard is a Research Software Engineer at The National Archives, working on digital aspects of research projects and with interests in both digital and traditional approaches to history and archives. Before joining TNA he completed an MA in Historical Research at Birkbeck College,University of London and prior to that he was a software engineer in the private sector, working on software development tools in a variety of roles and disciplines.

Jenifer Klepfer
UX Manager, The National Archives
Jenifer Klepfer is UX Manager in Digital Services at The National Archives. With a degree in Art History as well as an MSc in Human-Computer interaction, this project engages many of her passions.

Karen Protheroe and Tom Vaughan
Sanderson Design Group (SDG)
Karen Protheroe is the Archivist and Tom Vaughan is Digitisation Assistant at the SDG archive, a wallpaper and textile archive documenting the history of wallpaper manufacture in England since the foundation of Arthur Sanderson & Sons in 1860. They use digital tools to source designs and collaborate and communicate visual ideas, working with design teams in their UK factories and project partners across the world.

Jamie Steane
Jamie Steane is an associate professor in the School of Design, Northumbria University. Jamie’s current discipline and research interests are branded interactions, digital information systems and design pedagogy. Jamie previously worked internationally as a designer and creative director for numerous design and media businesses including Philips, Time-Warner, Windmill Lane Pictures and WPP in Europe, the USA and South East Asia.

Jo Briggs
Dr Jo Briggs is an associate professor in the School of Design, Northumbria University, whose research applies design practice approaches across two main interconnecting themes; designing and demonstrating tools to enable safer online interaction and design for the digital ‘collaborative’ economy. A further strand involves developing and critically reflecting upon design methodologies within interdisciplinary academic research and design industry practice.

Andy Cain
Andy Cain is a Northumbria University Interaction Design graduate who led on the development of the user interface and associated later user experience design for the Deep Discoveries prototype, with input from Jamie and Jo. He is now Junior Product Designer at W12, a digital design agency in Camden.