Year 2 Student - 2025 Cohort - Cohort 7

My academic background spans geography and data science, with a particular focus on quantitative and spatial methods. I completed a BSc in Geography at the University of the West of England, where I focused on GIS and remote sensing, climate change, and statistical analysis. I went on to complete an MSc in Data Science, where my research project explored the use of predictive modelling in humanitarian and geographic contexts. Alongside this, I studied topics such as data governance, the ethics of AI, and advanced statistics.

I chose to pursue a PhD in Cybersecurity because I'm interested in how digital, environmental, and economic systems overlap and influence one another. My current research interests lie at the intersection of cybersecurity, data science, and global systems; exploring how environmental, economic, and technological risks interact in increasingly interconnected infrastructures. I’m particularly drawn to approaches that combine data science and systems thinking such as network modelling and Bayesian analysis — to understand how uncertainty and risk evolve across interconnected digital and environmental systems.

Beyond the Individual: Collective Harm from Aggregated Data in Humanitarian Financial Systems

Refugee data is increasingly aggregated across aid and financial systems, and analysed with AI. This PhD investigates how this can expose groups of people to harm through demographically identifiable information (DII), meaning data that can be used to classify or track groups by characteristics such as gender or ethnicity, even when each person's data is handled properly. I will combine interviews with practitioners, system architects and refugees with computational experiments that measure how much group-level information can be inferred. Drawing on a realisation-based approach to justice, it asks what privacy protection should realistically mean in this context.

RISCS 2026 Annual Conference - Thursday 21st May. Day One: Cyber Security & Storytelling Symposium.

SOUPS 2026 August 23rd: Impact Conference on Societal Impact for Usable Privacy and Security Research. (one day workshop attended only, not main conference). https://impact-soups.github.io

Academic Placement with Partha Das Chowdhury: completion of a scoping review to establish the literature which already exists in the form of user studies, surrounding the broad themes of digital identity, financial inclusion systems used by refugees.

Industry Placement with NCC Group (Jon Renshaw): privacy and security challenges of content provenance and authenticity systems. https://www.nccgroup.com/research/privacy-and-security-challenges-of-content-provenance-and-authenticity-systems/ 

www.linkedin.com/in/demi-mccollum-6a51681a2