Team

Lise Jaillant was the Principal Investigator for the LUSTRE/ GLOW Network. She has a background in publishing history and digital humanities. Her expertise is on issues of Open Access and privacy with a focus on archives of digital information. She was the first researcher to access the emails of the writer Ian McEwan at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas. Her work has been recognised by a British Academy Rising Star award. She was the Principal Investigator for the AHRC Leadership Fellowship project, “Survival of the Weakest.”

From 2020, she led three other international networks on Archives and Artificial Intelligence: 

1. The AURA Network (Archives in the UK/ Republic of Ireland and AI) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council on the UK side and the Irish Research Council; 
2. The AEOLIAN Network (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations), funded by a joint programme between the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). 
3. the EyCon Project (Visual AI and Early Conflict Photography)  jointly funded by the AHRC (UK), and Labex Passés dans le Présent (France).

She is the author of a recent open-access article in Archival Science on making born-digital and digitised archives more accessible and co-author of an open-access article with AI & Society on unlocking digital archives with AI. She is the editor of Archives, Access and Artificial Intelligence, published open-access with Transcript Verlag, and has co-edited two special issues on approaches to improving the accessibility of born-digital and digitised archives, with Archival Science and AI & Society: Journal of Culture, Knowledge and Communication.   

More information on her work and further publications can be found on her personal website.

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Dr Haibin Cai is the Co-I of the Glow Ready project. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, Loughborough University. He completed his PhD in the School of Computing, University of Portsmouth in 2018. Dr. Cai has gained extensive experience in computer vision, artificial intelligence, and deep learning through his involvement in various research projects. These include the EU FP7-funded project Development of Robot-Enhanced Therapy for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, and the Innovate UK-funded project YOBAN.

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Dr Matthew Kidd is working as a Research Associate on the LUSTRE/GLOW and GLOW-Ready projects. Building on his work managing large crowdsourced collections relating to the First and Second World Wars, his current research focuses on applying AI techniques – including natural language processing and image analysis – to study political language, ideology, and memory in historical archives. Matthew also works as a Departmental Tutor and Research Associate at the University of Oxford.

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Dr Lingjia Zhao is a Research Associate on the LUSTRE/GLOW network and the GLOW-Ready project. She completed her PhD in Human Geography at Loughborough University in 2025, where her research explored power, participation and decision-making in planning processes. Through her work on LUSTRE/GLOW and GLOW-Ready, she supported the development and delivery of interdisciplinary research, working closely with academic, government and GLAM-sector partners. Lingjia also works as a Learning and Participation Research Officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

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Yuyue Guo is a PhD researcher at Loughborough University, working in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Her research focuses on the application of computer vision, natural language processing, and multimodal artificial intelligence. As part of the GLOW-Ready project, Yuyue has worked on the application of local large language models to email classification and summarisation, with a focus on developing practical tools for processing born-digital archival collections.

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Yutong Zhang is a PhD Researcher in Computer Science at Loughborough University. Her doctoral research focuses on vision-based human movement analysis and intelligent visual assessment, with broader interests in multimodal AI and AI-supported decision-making. Within the GLOW-Ready project, she develops local AI chatbot systems for email records, focusing on evidence retrieval, question answering, and summarisation.

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Olivia Mitchell is working as a Research Assistant as a part of the LUSTRE network. In 2022, Olivia completed her PhD at Loughborough University on the depiction of imperial India in the Anglophone press, using digital methodologies. She is currently working on two research articles for journal publication based on doctoral research. Olivia also works as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Manchester.

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Eric has a PhD in Media and International Development from the University of East Anglia. He has been a Teaching Fellow in Media and Communication at Loughborough University (London Campus) and has also been Associate Lecturer in the School of Communication and the Royal College of Arts (London).

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Cecilia Ghidotti is a scholar in the field of Cultural and Creative Industries. In 2022 she completed her PhD at Loughborough University London with a project on the education of aspiring cultural workers in the contemporary neoliberal creative economy, their subjectivities, and the unequal conditions of access to creative education and work. Drawing on a series of interviews with students of an Italian creative writing program, the research unravels participants’ diverse reasons and biographical trajectories challenging the notion that cultural work is intrinsically desirable and open to all. She has contributed with an invited chapter to the edited collection ‘The Industrialization of Creativity and Its Limits’ (Springer, 2020) with a chapter on Creative Writing Programs in the Italian Literary System.

contact: c.ghidotti@lboro.ac.uk

Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja is a research associate for LUSTRE as well as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of the Arts London working on the Worlding Public Cultures project. Her research interests span digital humanities, digital museum and heritage studies, digital narratology, and decolonial approaches in digital humanities. She obtained a PhD in Information Studies from the University of Glasgow in 2020 and holds a BA degree in Fine Arts and a MA degree in Publishing, Journalism and Arts Management. Additionally, Maribel has held positions at The Getty in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. In these institutions her work was focused on developing digital publications and projects.

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Katie Aske is a scholar of eighteenth-century literature and cultural history, and the digital humanities. After completing her PhD at Loughborough University in 2015, Aske undertook a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Université de Bretagne Occidentale in 2016, working on the digital humanities project ‘DIGITENS: Digital Encyclopaedia of European Sociability’. She has since worked on several research projects with Northumbria University, including the AHRC-funded Sterne Digital Library with Cambridge Digital Library. At Loughborough University, she previously worked on the AURA Network (Archives in the UK/ Republic of Ireland and AI) and currently works on the AEOLIAN Network (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations) and EyCon Project (Early Conflict Photography and Visual AI).