INVITATION ONLY
Launched in 2024, the Google DeepMind Research Ready scheme has funded over 130 paid AI research placements at universities throughout the UK in summer 2025. The scheme, aimed at undergraduates and recent graduates from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, aims to provide students with the tools and opportunities to progress into research and careers in AI, addressing barriers and supporting development of a stronger, more diverse AI research community. To celebrate the achievements of the 2025 cohort, we are holding an event at the Academy on Friday 12 September from 12pm to 3.30pm. This is a unique opportunity to meet students and faculty, learn about the Academy’s Awardee Excellence Community and hear from AI leaders about opportunities and careers in AI.
Venue and accessibility
It is very important to the Royal Academy of Engineering that our events are accessible to all. If you have any accessibility requirements, please contact the Events team more than one week in advance of this event so that necessary arrangements can be made. Contact details: [email protected].
Photography notice
Please note that photography will take place during this event. All photographs will be securely stored on the Academy’s servers and used for editorial, marketing and media use by the Academy and selected press or industry media. Please let us know if you do not agree to this processing. Please refer to our General Privacy Policy for more details.
Diversity monitoring form
The Academy is committed to building an inclusive economy that works for everyone. To help us achieve this, we would like to collect some basic anonymous data about the event attendees. If you would like to help, please complete the diversity monitoring form by logging into your user account on our website and completing ‘Update my D&I data’
Founding partners
Tim Harrison
Tim Harrison is a leading member of the Data and AI Team at Hg capital, working with Hg's portfolio companies to harness the potential of data and AI, working directly with the boards, C-level & senior management to deliver impact.
He joined Hg from Oliver Wyman Labs where he worked on a range of analytics, coding and Data Science projects primarily in Finance and Credit Risk. He also previously worked at Applied Predicted Technologies (APT), a SaaS company providing software for large consumer facing businesses for systematic initiative testing and analytics, which was acquired by Mastercard.
Tim grew up in London and completed his BA and MSci in Physics at the University of Cambridge. He relocated with the research group he worked with at Cambridge, to complete his PhD in Experimental Quantum Physics at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Ogulcan Gurelli
Former Research Ready Programme awardee and incoming Google DeepMind Scholar at UCL, where I will pursue an MSc in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. During the Research Ready Programme, I co-authored my first paper, ‘Visual-based Spatial Audio Generation System for Multi-Speaker Environments’, accepted at IEEE SMC 2025 in Austria.
Dr Alexandra Smyth
Alex’s own journey resonates with the Research Ready cohort. She went from an engineering research placement to a PhD to engineering policy advice. In her current role, Alex looks at what it takes to engineer responsible AI. Through the Academy’s People’s AI stewardship Summit, Alex and her team bring entrepreneurs in our network together with the public so they can hear how different members of the public feel about AI in society and specifically in the applications they are developing. Alex believes Research Ready is important, as she often hears concerns that the lived experiences of subsets of the public aren’t reflected in those designing the technology.
Alex is Head of Policy for Infrastructures and Resilience at the Royal Academy of Engineering. In her eight years at the Academy, Alex has been involved in a range of policy areas including leading the external review of the government’s National Security Risk Assessment methodology and the Academy’s COVID-19 response programme. She now oversees broad policy programmes on engineering responsible AI and maintaining safe, healthy, resilient infrastructure.
Dr Armin Mustafa
Dr Armin Mustafa is a strategic AI research leader with over 15 years of experience in computer vision, generative AI, and audio-visual AI. She is currently an Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Surrey's renowned Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) and an AI Fellow at the People Centred Institute of AI. She held the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship (2018 - 2025). Her research aims to develop seeing machines with the visual sense to understand and model dynamic real-world scenes. She leads the Audio-visual AI lab, which conducts research in video analysis, 3D/4D computer vision and audio-visual AI for next-generation entertainment applications. Beyond her academic contributions, Dr. Mustafa possesses significant commercial and product development experience. She co-founded the AI start-up SAIReco Ltd., which delivers generative AI tools for intelligent video narration.