Staff Profiles
Michael Alcorn
Centre Director
Michael Alcorn’s compositional interests lie at the intersection between instrumental, electroacoustic music and areas of new media creative practice. His music has been performed and broadcast in the UK, Europe, North and South America and the Far East and featured at leading new music festivals in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Poland and the US. He has received commissions from the BBC, The National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, the Nash Ensemble, Singcircle, the Smith Quartet, Darragh Morgan, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, Opera Theatre Company and the Ulster Orchestra.
Donal Phillips
Business Development Manager
Donal Phillips is Business Development Manager for the Creative Industries, based in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and provides project management on the Medialab initiative and strategic support on industry engagement. Donal’s background in the creative industries is predominantly in games development where he has worked as a sound designer, community manager and in production roles on a number of high profile projects including the Harry Potter and Sesame Street franchises and has breadth of experience collaborating with writers, designers, artists, performers, musicians and software developers. An interest in innovation, entrepreneurship and start-ups led him to taking a role with NI Screen, as the lead for the Interactive Sector. Through this role, he developed a range of regional interventions to support the interactive entertainment industry and the emerging field of Immersive Technologies, supporting IP development and securing in-coming productions and establishing the first dedicated games incubator, The Pixel Mill, and was a co-investigator on Future Screens NI.
Jia-Rey Chang
Lecturer
Jia-Rey (Gary) Chang is a Taiwanese artist/designer/researcher/educator focusing on immersive spatial Interaction Design. “Looking for the evolving relationship between the human body and space mediated by technology” and “utilizing technology as a creative medium to tackle and arouse current social/humanity questions” have always been the main concepts throughout his creative research and artworks. He received his Ph.D. from the Hyperbody Lab at TU Delft, the Netherlands in 2018 with the dissertation “HyperCell: A Bio-inspired Design Frameworks for Real-time Interactive Architectures”. He was an assistant professor in the Art & Design department, University of Delaware, USA (2018-2022). Currently, he is a lecturer in the Medialab, Queen’s University Belfast, UK, investigating using Games and Emerging Technologies as creative concepts and mediums to create experimental interactive immersive sensory spaces. His works cover trans-disciplinary topics of creative coding, speculative/interactive/parametric design, fashion/wearable design, AI, generative art/sound, and AR/VR/MR, projection-based immersive environment. More info: archgary.com.
Darragh Lydon
Lecturer
Darragh Lydon is a Lecturer in Games Development in Queen’s University Belfast. His primary degree is Computer Games Development with 5 years industry experience. Throughout this time in industry, he was involved in the development of 20 titles, consisting of both original IP and client projects. For the past six years he has been working in the area of infrastructure monitoring, using applied computer vision and deep learning techniques to gain insights on structural health of civil infrastructure. His research focus has been in the application of proactive maintenance of infrastructure based on information gathered from advanced monitoring methods paired with synthetic data generation and visualisation.
Eilis Phillips
Project Support Officer
Eilís Phillips is responsible for providing comprehensive support for the operational activity of the MediaLab office and for the day-to-day management of the MediaLab studios and facilities. She recently completed a Research Fellow position on the CSIT / MediaLab Shaping the Metaverse project. Her research centred around the development of standards and interoperability in virtual worlds. Eilís holds a PhD in Cultural History and Monster Theory, with a specialism in the concept of ‘Monstrous Environments’. Outside of academia, Eilís has worked in the creative sector for over 20 years, and is passionate about promoting interdisciplinary research and collaboration across the Arts and Sciences
Daniel Brice
Research Fellow
Dr Daniel Brice is a research fellow within the School of Arts, English and Languages to work in the new MediaLab, developing experiments and prototypes in the field of advanced media production. His previous research interests are developing multisensorial feedback systems to enhance user capabilities and/or immersion in VR/AR and conducting user studies to investigate user behaviour. A few examples of his research are proof of concepts in digital work instructions for Mixed Reality (MR), use of ultrasound haptics for virtual spider stimuli in VR and health and safety induction for VR. Specifically, Daniel will be utilising game engines to create impact within areas such as XR, Metaverse and virtual production.
Robbie Coey
MediaLab Technician
Robbie Coey is a Medialab Technician at Queen's University Belfast. Prior to this, Robbie was co-director of Holomoon Games, an independent game studio based in Belfast. Their game, "Raccoons with Jobs", won the 2023 Games Transformed game jam, and was featured in an arcade cabinet at "The World Transformed" festival. Robbie is a self-taught Unity developer, having been featured on their blog in 2023. He has a PGCert in Writing for Games from Trinity College Dublin. Robbie has also facilitated several workshops based around game development with Into Film’s work experience scheme Screenworks.
Aimee O'Neill
Project Support Officer
Aimee O’Neill is a Project Support Officer based at the Media Lab at Queen’s University, from the School of Arts, English and Languages. She has BA (Hons) in Film Studies and Media Studies from University of Ulster. Aimee has previous job experience working for the BBC and received the International Women’s Day Centenary Certificate for Story Writing, provided by The Equality Commission of Northern Ireland in 2011.
