Dr Stella Doukianou

Biography

Stella is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for the BSc Creative Computing programme at the Creative Computing Institute. She leads the course with a focus on building a community of practitioners across disciplines, using hands-on activities like hackathons, design sprints, student societies, and a buddy scheme.
Her work starts from a simple belief: technology should bring people closer, not pull them apart. With a background in engineering and a long interest in digital media and computer science, she has spent over a decade working where technology and creativity meet. Her practice centres on community, game design, and extended reality (XR), building immersive experiences through collaborative design. For Stella, XR is a shared space where creative work, critical thinking, and real lived experience come together. She wants immersive systems that are made with communities, not just for them, and digital tools that support cultural heritage and environmental justice. She believes innovation should be measured by inclusion and impact, not only technical progress.
Before joining the Creative Computing Institute, Stella was a Lecturer on the Games Design and Development programme at the University of Greenwich, where she led modules in Game Development and Virtual Reality Principles. Before moving into academia, she worked in London's IT sector as a Research Consultant, designing games for assessment and behavioural change.
Stella has contributed to several EU-funded projects under the FP7 and HORIZON frameworks, working on energy, culture, and IoT. She is currently working on a Knowledge Exchange project, developing a serious game to destigmatise the refugee journey through immersive media.
Stella holds an MSc in Design and Digital Media from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in Computer Science from Coventry University, focused on data visualisation in games. She has a SEDA certification for PhD supervision and is a Full Professional Member of the British Computer Society (MBCS), a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA), and a member of the Computer Arts Society specialist interest group.