Our Team

Meet the team behind the Drone Systems Laboratory.

Prof. James Riordan

Director and Principal Investigator

James is Professor of Robotics & Autonomous Systems. His research focuses on AI-driven robotic perception. He is Principal Investigator on multiple projects funded by the European Commission, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Natural Environmnet Research Council (NERC), and he is Programme Leader of the MSc Advanced Drone Technology.

Callum Knox

Research Project Manager

Callum is Research Project Manager and Innovation Broker. As Chief Drone Pilot and Accountable Person with the Civil Aviation Authority, he also oversees the university’s Specific Category Operational Authorisation. Holding an MSc in Applied Social Research, Callum leads stakeholder engagement initiatives.

Dr. Manduhu Manduhu

Senior Post Doctoral Research Assistant

Manduhu received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in information engineering from Hiroshima University, Japan, in 2010 and 2013, respectively. His research interests include optimisation of parallel algorithms, physics modelling and simulation ,and intelligent computer vision.

Alex Dow

Post Doctoral Research Assistant

Alex is a Research Assistant on the UKRI Digital Dairy Chain and NERC FLORA-SAGE projects, focusing on hyperspectral monitoring of biodiversity and ecosystem health in permanent grasslands. He holds an MSc in Digital Signal and Image Processing from University of Sussex. Currently completing his PhD at DSL, he previously worked on real-time LiDAR-based object detection for drones as part of the H2020 RAPID project (Risk-Aware Port Inspection Drones).

Dr. Althaff Irfan Cader Mohideen

Cybersecurity Lecturer

Althaff is Programme Leader for the MSc Cyber Security at UWS. Previously, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster. He holds a PhD in Information Science and Control Engineering from Nagaoka University of Technology, Japan (2011). His research spans cybersecurity, internet, and communication engineering, with a focus on trust and security in IoT cloud systems.

Dr. Raman Singh

Cybersecurity Lecturer

Raman is Programme Leader for MEng/BEng (Hons) Cyber Security at UWS. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Panjab University and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship with Trinity College Dublin. He specialises in blockchain technologies, 5G security, intrusion detection, and machine learning for cybersecurity. Raman is a Cisco and ISC2-certified instructor.