A PhD student has lost her thesis after thieves took her laptop and hard drives

The lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan has lost four years of work

A woman has issued a desperate appeal for help after thieves stole a laptop and hard drives containing her PhD thesis.

Postgraduate photography student Jacqui Knight has been left devastated after criminals made off with four years of academic work when they broke into into her car in Llandaff , Cardiff.

The Cardiff Metropolitan University associate lecturer had parked her car in the car park of the Maltsters pub on Tuesday, December 5, to meet a colleague.

After smashing the window of her Volkswagen Golf, thieves took her MacBook Pro laptop along with two portable hard drives, six USB pen drives, and her passport.

Jacqui had been working on her PhD photography thesis for four years

The Plymouth University student, from Cornwall, said: “Unfortunately I do so much travelling I have to leave things in my car.

“It’s a big car park with floodlights so I thought it would be reasonably safe so I put it under my seat with my scarf on top.”

After being offered the chance to screen a film in Newcastle the following night the academic had been travelling with multiple hard drives containing different files.

Her passport was also in the same bag after taking it to the university for a DBS check.

She said: “The worst thing about it is the personal information.

“My thesis is the culmination of four years work as I’m in my write-up year.

“It’s an unimaginable amount of hard work. Some of it I can retrieve piecemeal but not the entirety.”

Jacqui had visited the archives of photographers across Europe for her thesis

As well as annotated notes, the hard drives and laptop also contained archived photos and material from photographers across Europe.

Miss Knight, 44, said: “I had gone to copy old photos archived in Amsterdam and from the Magnum Photos archives.

“I had to travel to these places as they are very guarded, they weren’t sent by email.

“I went to David Hurn’s house and he gave me artefacts from his personal archives – he was really supportive of my work.

“You can’t get any of that back.”

She added: “It’s nothing to do with the physical value of it – I would rather have given them £1,000 for a computer.”

A spokesman for South Wales Polic e said: “We can confirm that a laptop was stolen among other personal items from inside a car which was parked in The Maltsters pub car park on December 5. Anybody who has information about the theft is urged to contact South Wales Police via 101 quoting reference 476691.”