We are delighted to share that Dr Philip Obiorah (Learning Development Coach in Computing) has officially been accepted into the Google Developer Experts Programme as a Google Developer Expert (GDE) in Cloud AI.

The GDE programme is a global network of professionals recognised by Google for their technical expertise and significant contributions to the developer community through speaking, publishing, mentoring and knowledge sharing.

Dr Obiorah’s profile is now live in the official Google Developer Experts Directory.

Reflecting on the recognition, Dr Obiorah said:

“I look forward to using this opportunity to further support AI education, knowledge exchange and external engagement within the University and the wider developer community.”

We are proud to support staff development and celebrate their successes. This recognition is a great example of how our colleagues stay connected to industry and bring current professional practice into the Faculty.

As part of our 50th anniversary celebrations, we held our first Research Day on Friday 11 September, bringing together postgraduate researchers and staff to showcase the breadth, diversity and impact of research taking place across the University.

Our Chancellor, Dame Mary Archer, also lent her support to the event by attending the day, which featured a postgraduate research conference, with researchers presenting their work on a wide range of fascinating topics including:

• Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Mindset: How University Ecosystems Shape Innovation Capability and Startup Success Among Graduates
• AI vs Human Examiners: A Comparative Study of Viva Voce Question Generation in Higher Education
• Judicial Independence and Sustainable Good Governance in Nigeria
• No Feminism without Socialism: The Politics of Class in the novels of Angela Carter
• Supervision in Schools: Understanding an Emerging Professional Practice
• How Creative Do You Think AI Art Really Is?

In her opening speech, Dame Mary Archer, Chancellor of The University of Buckingham, commented:

“I’m proud as Chancellor that the University is holding its first Postgraduate Research Conference. I’m proud of the range of work represented here. I’m proud of the supervisors and staff who support it. Above all, I’m proud of the researchers themselves, whose work reminds us what a university is for.

A university is not only a place where knowledge is transmitted. It’s a place where knowledge is questioned, extended, corrected and created. It’s a place where inherited wisdom sometimes has to yield to new evidence. It’s a place where disciplines develop, but also where they meet. It’s a place where the next question is always just round the corner.”

Congratulations for the following six students who all received an award for their research:

• Best Oral Presentation awards: Rashmi Perera, Charlotte Carry & Shiyamalaraj Kandasamy
• Best Poster Presentation awards: Isuri Uwanthika, Kemisola Adesida & Cedric Nnah

The programme highlighted the innovative and interdisciplinary research being undertaken across our academic community. Attendees had the opportunity to engage with presentations, connect with researchers and vote for the Best Oral Presentation and Best Poster Presentation awards, recognising excellence in both research and academic communication.

You can discover our postgraduate research offering in our course finder.

The University of Buckingham ranks 2nd in the UK for Graduate Salaries and 3rd for Graduate Careers on Track in the Daily Mail University Guide 2027

The University of Buckingham is proud to announce that we have achieved two top-five rankings in the Daily Mail University Guide 2027 that recognise our salary outcomes and the proportion of graduates who feel their career is on-track.

For Graduate Salaries, our 2nd place ranking is secured with an average salary of £36,000 15 months post-graduation for undergraduate courses.

For Graduate Careers on Track we have ranked 3rd in the UK, further highlighting our focus on graduate outcomes and preparing our students for the world of work.

In addition to these achievements, our overall ranking has risen significantly by 18 points, to 63rd in the UK.

These rankings follow our other recent success in the Complete University Guide 2027, where we achieved 2nd place for Graduate Prospects On Track and 10th place for Graduate Prospects – Outcomes.

Interim Vice-Chancellor, David Cole, said:

“To be recognised once again for our commitment to graduate success is a tremendous achievement for the University. At Buckingham, exceptional student experiences and outstanding outcomes are at the heart of everything we do, and we have consistently focused on enhancing this at every stage of the student journey. This recognition from the Daily Mail University Guide reflects the dedication, ambition and unwavering commitment of our staff to delivering an exceptional education and empowering our graduates to thrive.”

In 1976, The University of Buckingham was founded on a bold proposition: that there was another way to deliver higher education.

Fifty years later, the landscape facing students has transformed. Artificial intelligence is changing the workplace at pace, pathways into employment have diversified, and learners are questioning the traditional assumptions surrounding university study more than ever before. Yet Buckingham’s founding spirit remains remarkably relevant.

As we celebrate our 50th anniversary, we are not simply reflecting on our history. We are asking an important question about the future.

How should universities respond when students are increasingly weighing traditional higher education routes against apprenticeships, entrepreneurship, employment and alternative routes to success? For institutions across the sector, this moment requires more than nostalgia. It demands innovation.

At Buckingham, innovation has always involved challenging established thinking. Our pioneering two-year degree model was once considered unconventional. 50 years after welcoming our first students, it still addresses many of the challenges that students cite most frequently:

• the cost of study and return on investment
• the time commitment required to achieve a degree
• concerns about the level of contact time with academics

The launch of our celebratory fees offer reflects this ethos. It is not simply a pricing initiative. It is a statement about our responsibility as a university to engage honestly with changing student expectations and evolving market conditions.

Buckingham was founded by people who believed higher education could be delivered differently. As we mark our 50th anniversary, we remain committed to that spirit of innovation. Our role is not simply to preserve established models but to challenge ourselves continually to meet the needs of future generations.

The higher education sector is entering a period of profound change. Students are becoming more discerning consumers of education. They are asking tougher questions about outcomes, affordability and return on investment.

This is not something universities should fear.

In fact, it presents an opportunity to reimagine how we demonstrate value, how we support student success and how we deliver education in ways that are both academically rigorous and financially sustainable.

Buckingham’s story has always been one of progress through innovation.

After 50 years, that story is far from finished.

Find out more about our celebratory fees offer.

The APSL Research Symposium 2026 was held on 3 July 2026 at the Sri Lanka High Commission in London, under the patronage of the Sri Lanka High Commission UK. The event brought together researchers, academics, professionals, and students from the UK, Sri Lanka, and beyond to present innovative research across education, health, artificial intelligence, sustainability, business, law, and public policy. The symposium featured oral and poster presentations, expert panel discussions, and networking opportunities, highlighting the vital role of research, innovation, entrepreneurship, and international collaboration in shaping Sri Lanka’s future.

Among the presenters were several PhD researchers from the School of Computing at the University of Buckingham. Isuri Gatamanna Arachchige presented research on ‘Machine Learning for Early Alzheimer’s Disease Risk Prediction and Biomarker Discovery using Genetic Data’, exploring the potential of artificial intelligence to support earlier diagnosis and improved patient outcomes. Rashmi Perera showcased an ‘Empirical Evaluation of AI-Based Viva-Voce Question Generation within Higher Education’, examining how generative AI can enhance assessment practices in academic settings. Madara Premawardhana discussed ‘The Hidden Cost of AI: Energy Efficiency Evaluation of Solar Forecasting Models in a Digital Twin Framework’, addressing the sustainability implications of emerging AI technologies. Congratulations to all of them, and especially to Madara, whose presentation was recognised as one of the symposium’s four best presentations.

The symposium also featured a diverse range of research from universities and institutions across the UK, Sri Lanka, Finland, and Germany. The breadth of research showcased the growing strength of international collaboration and the contribution of Sri Lankan researchers to addressing global challenges.

Organised by the Association of Professional Sri Lankans UK (APSL), the symposium forms part of the organisation’s ongoing mission to connect professionals, academics, and emerging leaders, fostering knowledge exchange, mentoring, innovation, and collaboration between Sri Lanka and the global Sri Lankan diaspora.

Isuri (candidate for PhD in Computing) said, “It was a privilege to present my research at the APSL Research Symposium 2026, held at the High Commission of Sri Lanka in the United Kingdom. The event provided an excellent opportunity to share my work, receive valuable feedback, and connect with both academic and industry professionals. I sincerely thank APSL for organising such a remarkable event. The symposium is an outstanding platform for fostering research collaboration between the UK and Sri Lanka and encouraging meaningful knowledge exchange. I am truly grateful to have been part of this inspiring experience.”

Linaya (BSc Computing [AI & Robotics]) who attended the symposium said, “Attending the APSL Research Symposium 2026 at the Sri Lanka High Commission was such a valuable experience for me as an undergraduate. Being able to sit alongside and speak directly with industry professionals and postgraduate researchers gave me a real sense of what’s possible beyond my degree.”

“As a final year AI and Robotics student, it was genuinely inspiring to see how AI and technology are being applied to tackle these problems and it pushed me to think about how I can apply my own knowledge in similar ways. Several postgraduate presentations also gave me new ideas that I’m now hoping to incorporate into my final year project. Beyond the research itself, I met a lot of like-minded young people from the community and had great conversations about future opportunities and the panel discussion offered real insight into what it means to be Sri Lankan and building a career here in the UK.”

It is with great sadness that the University has learnt of the death, on 20 July at the age of 93, of Sir Christopher Ondaatje OC, CBE: a loyal friend to Buckingham over three decades and one of its most generous benefactors.

Over his long life, Christopher Ondaatje achieved distinction in multiple spheres: as an Olympic athlete, successful businessman, prolific author, explorer of the sources of the Nile, and as a philanthropist whose support for the arts and education has had a major impact in his adoptive homeland, Canada, as well as in the United Kingdom.

Christopher Ondaatje was born in 1933 into an affluent Anglo-Dutch military family in what was then the British colony of Ceylon (later Sri Lanka). He was sent to England for his schooling and was educated at Blundell’s School in Devon to the age of 16, when the divorce of his parents, and the financial crisis which this entailed, forced him to leave school prematurely and to make his own way in the world. With the possibility of a university education foreclosed to him, he turned to commerce. After emigrating to Canada in his early twenties, Sir Christopher made fortunes in stock-broking and later in publishing, becoming by the early 1990s one of the country’s most prominent and successful businessmen – while also finding the time to compete in the 1964 Winter Olympics as a member of the Canadian four-man bobsleigh team and to maintain a keen interest in cricket.

His desire to promote closer educational links between Canada and the UK lay behind Sir Christopher’s first involvement with Buckingham, in 2003, when he established a series of scholarships to enable student exchanges between the University and Massey College in Toronto. The University of Buckingham’s award to him of an honorary Doctorate of Letters that same year was a recognition of his philanthropic contributions both to us and to the cultural life of Britain more generally.

Further benefactions followed, most notably in 2015, when Sir Christopher’s longstanding interest in history, literature and the arts moved him to become involved with the University’s recently established Humanities Research Institute, to which he offered both advice and financial support. A seven-figure donation that year provided the Institute with a permanent home on campus in the newly created Ondaatje Research Centre and also enabled the University to acquire the town’s 15th-century vicarage, which was renamed in his honour as Ondaatje Hall.

His benefaction has been the catalyst for a major transformation of Humanities research within the University, with graduate student numbers growing from a few dozen at the time of his gift to approaching 300 in 2026.

The University mourns one of its firmest and most generous friends and extends its deepest sympathy to his family in their loss.

Philip Obiorah, Learning Development Coach in Computing at The University of Buckingham, attended Google I/O Connect Berlin 2026, an invitation-only event that brought together developers from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa to explore the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence, Android, Web and Cloud technologies.

Throughout the event, Philip participated in technical sessions and hands-on workshops delivered by Google engineers and product teams, covering topics including Gemini, Gemma, Agent Development Kit (ADK), Model Context Protocol (MCP), BigQuery, Google Maps, and the latest tools for building production-ready AI applications.

Among the sessions attended were:

• Google DeepMind AI Stack for Developers
• The ABCs of Agent Building: ADK and Beyond
• Gemma: Open Models in the Agentic Era
• Build a Location Intelligence ADK Agent with MCP Servers for BigQuery and Google Maps
• Build Agents with the Gemini API

The event focused on how developers can move beyond traditional prompt-based AI towards building intelligent systems capable of reasoning, tool use, multimodal interaction and enterprise integration.

In addition to the technical programme, Philip met with Google Developer Relations staff, Google Developer Experts and developers from across the region, strengthening professional networks and sharing experiences in applied AI, cloud computing and developer education.

Reflecting on the event, Philip said:

“Google I/O Connect Berlin provided valuable insight into the future of AI application development. It reinforced that modern AI is no longer just about interacting with language models, but about building intelligent systems that combine reasoning, tools, enterprise data and cloud services. The knowledge gained will directly support my teaching, student employability initiatives and curriculum development within the School of Computing.”

Since returning from the event, Philip has begun publishing a technical article series on Medium, sharing practical insights from each session to make the content accessible to students, developers and the wider AI community.

Attendance at Google I/O Connect Berlin aligns with The University of Buckingham’s commitment to strengthening industry engagement and ensuring that students benefit from exposure to emerging technologies and current professional practice in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.

Third-year medical students from The University of Buckingham took part in a large-scale Major Incident Simulation on Thursday 16 July, putting their clinical skills to the test in one of the University’s most realistic training exercises.

The annual event took place at the Ford Meadow playing fields on The University of Buckingham campus and was designed to give students the opportunity to apply their developing skills in leadership, triage, communication, acute medical management and decision-making in a challenging and fast-moving environment.

This year’s scenario centred around a major road traffic collision involving four cars and a bus on a busy dual carriageway. The resulting traffic jam left a coach carrying the medical students stranded nearby. As enthusiastic future doctors, they decided to help, only to discover a complex and chaotic scene with casualties suffering a wide range of simulated injuries, including traumatic lower limb amputations, pregnant patients in active labour and distressed relatives.

The high-fidelity simulation is the medical school’s award-winning flagship practical training event, bringing together a wide range of organisations to recreate the pressures of a real major incident.

Alongside the medical students, crews from Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service, Thames Valley Police (and Paramedics from South-Central Ambulance Service) took part, helping to enhance the realism of the exercise while providing an opportunity for the emergency services to practice their own response procedures.

Dr Sunjay Paul, Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, said:

“This simulation gives our students the opportunity to experience the challenges of a major incident in a safe but highly realistic environment.

It allows them to put into practice the clinical and communication skills they have developed throughout their studies while learning how to work effectively under pressure, manage uncertainty and collaborate with emergency services. It is an invaluable part of their medical education.”

Buckingham Medical School

Buckingham’s Medical School is committed to providing students with an immersive and supportive learning environment.

Our condensed 4.5-year MB ChB programme is based on a well-established curriculum, with patient contact introduced from the very first term, giving our students extensive opportunities to develop the knowledge, confidence and practical experience needed for a career in medicine.