Photonics CDT student captains UCL team on BBC's University Challenge
We are excited to see our very own PhD student, Michael Doherty, captain this year's UCL University Challenge team, confidently leading the team to victory in their first match against SOAS with a score of 210 to 170.
Michael Doherty is a PhD student at UCL on the EPSRC CDT in Connected Electronic and Photonic Systems (CEPS) training programme, and a Turing Enrichment Scheme Scholar at The Alan Turing Institute. His PhD research focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) for control and optimisation of next-generation optical networks, supervised by Dr Alejandra Beghelli and Dr Laura Toni.
So far, Michael has shown an impressive amount of general knowledge far beyond the scopes of optical networks, and we look forward to seeing him in many more rounds!
University Challenge is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.
Connect with Michael Doherty
UCL researcher profile: https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/85400-michael-d-doherty
Turing Scholar profile: https://www.turing.ac.uk/people/doctoral-students/michael-doherty
Further information
About Michael's research: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2575356
Michael’s research is supported by the EPSRC CDT in Connected Electronic and Photonic Systems (CEPS) training programme grant EP/S022139/1: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP/S022139/1
Published: November 2025
Images: University Challenge images © copyright BBC 2025