CAM-Doctoral Training Partnership PhD studentships

Supervisors: Prof Aled Jones; Dr Philippa Calver; Dr Christos Gerofotis ([email protected])

In its 2023 Global Risks Report, the World Economic Forum ranked biodiversity loss as its fourth global risk in terms of both severity and impact. The main source of this biodiversity loss is due to land use change and agriculture practices.

Subsequently, this reduces the provision of vital ecosystem services, such as pollination of food crops, water treatment, and fertile soil, that the agricultural system relies.

Changes to food production and biodiversity also affect systems much wider than on the farm, and impact livelihoods of rural communities, as well as wider society through impacts on food prices in the context of a cost-of-living crisis.

This PhD will investigate best practices in farming that result in positive biodiversity outcomes. It will explore how food sector governance (including investment and new funding streams such as Biodiversity Net Gain) can be incorporated into land management decision processes and be supported by national policy to further enhance biodiversity.

Our current projects exploring food risk and agriculture in the UK include a range of partners (such as Food Ethics Council, WWF, Sustain, Better Food Traders, Trussell Trust). Dengie Crops Ltd in Essex have agreed to be a case study and give access to their governance and decision-making processes.

Apply to study farming for biodiversity (full-time)

Apply to study farming for biodiversity (part-time)

Supervisors: Dr Nieky Van Veggel; Dr Hilary Engward

Existing research highlights the positive impacts of assistance dogs on reducing social isolation for those with disabilities. However, there is very little research into how individuals and families are impacted by the retirement of their assistance dogs, or these dogs’ welfare during retirement.

This PhD will explore these topics by a OneWelfare approach. It will use a mixed-method study, involving quantitative surveys of assistance dog owners and their families, qualitative interviews to understand lived experiences, and co-designing resources for retiring assistance dogs.

We offer a research environment that encourages collaboration and idea exchange, particularly between people with varied academic backgrounds. The project integrates social sciences, animal welfare, and healthcare with the aim of holistically preparing assistance dog owners and their dogs for retirement of the partnership.

Apply to study applying OneWelfare to assistance dog retirement (full-time)

Apply to study applying OneWelfare to assistance dog retirement (part-time)

Supervisors: Prof Jane Aspell; Dr Sanjoy Deb; Dr Maria Filippetti (University of Essex)

Ultra-processed foods (UPF) are hyper-palatable, energy-dense products that are often of low nutritional quality. They contribute to an obesogenic environment and unhealthy nutritional behaviours that can harm human health. There is a propensity to overconsume UPFs, with reports showing UPFs make up over 50% of dietary intake.

An overlooked aspect of human health, particularly with UPFs, is interoception– the perception of the body’s internal states. This PhD will investigate whether interoception is linked to UPF intake, using both experience sampling methods (ESM) and laboratory investigations.

Samples will reflect populations affected by high UPF consumption, particularly ethnic groups underserved by such studies. The resultant research will be used to design an intuitive eating intervention, targeting interoceptive awareness, to reduce UPF intake in daily life.

The overconsumption of UPF is a public health issue, which impacts health inequalities across socio-economic and ethnic boundaries. Because of this, we are particularly interested in applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. You will be assisted by an interdisciplinary supervisory team, with plenty of experience in student development.

Apply to study UPF overconsumption and interoceptive awareness (full-time)

Apply to study UPF overconsumption and interoceptive awareness (part-time)

Supervisors: Dr Lauren Godier-McBard; Dr Chris Kay; Dr Linda Maguire (University of Suffolk)

There is a scarcity of literature on parenthood with a physical disability, particularly for women veterans. This study will focus on women veterans who have acquired physical injury during service, to understand the impact of disability on pregnancy and child rearing.

Negotiating military-to-civilian transition has an additional layer of complexity if physical injury was sustained during service. This is known as being wounded, injured and sick (WIS).

However, studies of WIS veterans often come with assumptions. They often assume their children act as carers or focus on the disability itself from the veteran or practitioner perspective. Moreover, there is very little research focusing on women veterans, despite the proportion of female WIS personnel in defence recovery services being higher than that of male personnel.

This study will explore coping from women veterans’ perspective, in the context of returning to a civilian life, and negotiating pregnancy and childrearing with disabilities.

This PhD is part of ARU’s initiative to expand the study of military personnel. It comes in tandem with the expansion of the Centre for Military Women's Research and the Veterans & Families Institute (VFI), and the development of a new Centre for Equities in Uniformed Public Services. This initiative, funded by UKRI, will incorporate a new social science lab to support inclusivity for those with physical, mental, and neurodiverse needs.

Apply to female veterans: disability and parenthood (full-time)

Apply to female veterans: disability and parenthood (part-time)

Supervisors: Prof Margaret Greenfields, Prof Jeannette Baxter, Dr Chantal Radley

This interdisciplinary PhD will explore the experiences of refugees/asylum seekers (R/ASs) in the UK who may experience identity-specific barriers to accessing services and community assets.

More precisely, it will focus on those discriminated against due to sexual orientation, gender reassignment or membership of a minority faith group within their national diaspora or refugee population.

Services delivered to R/ASs through local authorities, religious or civil society agencies are largely predicated on the demographics of a 'mainstream' refugee population. Thus, people from a region or country where they are a member of a faith or sexual minority group and who may already have experienced persecution or discrimination in their country of origin are likely to self-censor when seeking asylum, accommodation, or healthcare. This can severely impact their well-being.

This studentship aligns to an inter-disciplinary UKRI cross-council investment, which utilises creative methods to understand use of community assets by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants to support health/wellbeing.

The successful applicant will benefit from access to diverse policy makers, practitioners, and health and creative arts professionals. This supervisory team has extensive experience working with diverse refugee/asylum seeking populations.

The student will be embedded into ARU's inter-university migration network and New Routes: Old Roots refugee support network. This will offer collaborative opportunities, including with LGBT+ faith groups, the University of Cambridge, and the United Nations Faith for Rights network.

Apply to study minority faith group/LGBT+ refugees in the UK (full-time)

Apply to study minority faith group/LGBT+ refugees in the UK (part-time)

Supervisors: Dr Emma Kaminskiy; Dr Lesley Storey

This knowledge exchange studentship will involve exploring the phenomenon of frequent callers to an NHS mental health crisis support service. This pioneering service receives 2,000 calls per month from people experiencing a variety of mental health issues.

This research aims to ensure that callers have their needs met, as well as enabling the Trust to manage the resource demands posed by frequent callers. It will analyse recordings of interactions, and interviews with the frequent callers, to understand their experiences.

Health and social care professionals are still underrepresented in wider academia and clinical research settings, making this a great opportunity for clinicians from those backgrounds.

There will also be the opportunity to undertake a placement at the Trust and observe the workings of the service. Training in a range of advanced qualitative analysis approaches will be provided. If you have taken a less conventional route to PhD study, this project might be of particular interest to you.

Apply to study understanding frequent callers to NHS crisis lines (full-time)

Apply to study understanding frequent callers to NHS crisis lines (part-time)

Supervisors: Dr Lara Houston; Dr Chris Foulds

Community re-use and repair groups help citizens to extend the lifetimes of their products, fostering an inclusive 'circular economy' (CE) by slowing cycles of consumption, and therefore reducing emissions and waste.

New digital tools introduced by policymakers, such as Digital Product Passports, are designed primarily for businesses. Due to their informal or non-profit status, community re-use and repair groups will be excluded from full CE data. Their needs have been overlooked in research and policy on emerging CE tech – including platforms, and AI.

This PhD seeks to address this gap, e.g. by undertaking participatory research with re-use and repair groups to bring their unique needs and novel insights into design and policy.

Apply to study including community re-use and repair groups in circular economy digitalization (full-time)

Apply to study including community re-use and repair groups in circular economy digitalization (part-time)

Supervisors: Dr Elsa Lee; Dr Joel Chalfen (University of Cambridge); Dr Emma Miles

There has been a noticeable rise in the proportion of young adults with higher education qualification in the UK over the past 20 years. However, the proportion of graduates considered to be “underemployed” is estimated to be over one-third, with females and graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds more badly affected.

This phenomenon has caught the attention of both policy makers and university administrators. Surveys of employers suggest that apart from structural issues in the labour market, a lack of soft skills and career resilience in graduates could be causing this.

This project assesses the efficacy of a unique student employability initiative from a post-92 university in improving students’ employability skills and career resilience. We'll adopt a mixed method approach, utilising individual level student administrative data, as well as structured surveys of students post-graduation.

Apply to study public pedagogies and environmental justice (full-time)

Apply to study public pedagogies and environmental justice (part-time)

Supervisors: Dr Jonathan Pool; Prof Simon Baron-Cohen (University of Cambridge); Dr Alexandra Georgaki

This project is an analysis of music therapy with autistic children, with an aim to develop policy regarding music therapy for autistic 7- to 11-year-olds.

In this trial, 120 autistic children will receive 24 sessions of music therapy. You will use video data from this trial to provide a detailed analysis of the engagement and interaction.

Sampling and analysis strategies will be an important aspect of this topic. The participants are recruited from schools in different areas of England, with diverse cultural backgrounds and varying levels of affluence.

The study will be linked to the Autism-CHIME project, a randomised controlled trial of improvisational music therapy with autistic children. It is led by the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University and the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research (CIMTR) at Anglia Ruskin University and is currently collecting data. The Autism-CHIME trial seeks to produce data that informs healthcare decision making in actual clinical settings, rather than ascertaining outcomes under controlled circumstances.

Your research could make a difference, by ensuring autistic children get the education they need.

Apply to study analysing music therapy with autistic children (full-time)

Apply to study analysing music therapy with autistic children (part-time)

Supervisors: Dr Elizabeth Kirk; Dr Jacob Dunn

This proposed programme of research will use lab-based studies to investigate the psychological and physiological responses of adults to infant crying. It will focus on adult men, to explore the psychological and social risk factors of hyper-arousal and infant abuse.

Crying is a normal infant behaviour. Yet for some adults, this elicits an extreme stress response. Reports estimate that up to 6% of parents have smothered, slapped, or shaken their baby at least once because of crying, with men being more likely to harm a child than women.

An independent review for government highlighted that fathers with stressful life histories can find it harder to cope with their crying baby, resulting in a greater number of non-accidental head injuries (shaken baby syndrome). The report recommends an urgent need for research to understand backgrounds, characteristics, and triggers for abuse by men.

This study will be interdisciplinary, encompassing psychology, evolutionary biology, and psychoacoustics. In psychoacoustic playback experiments in the laboratory, the listeners will hear natural and resynthesized baby cries, allowing us to experimentally investigate the acoustic factors that lead to variation in the adult listeners' responses. Listeners will answer psychological tests and will be monitored for their physiological responses to baby cries before, during and after the experiments.

The research has applied implications for the fields of social work and healthcare. We are looking for applicants with a desire to improve child protection and the lives of vulnerable families and children.

Apply to study male stress responses to infant crying (full-time)

Apply to study male stress responses to infant crying (part-time)

Supervisors: Dr Sharon Geva; Dr Debora Vasconcelos e Sa; Dr Elizabeth A. Warburton (University of Cambridge)

Estimates suggest that around 40% of stroke survivors develop aphasia, an impairment of language function. Aphasia has a drastic impact on wellbeing of both patients and their carers. This project will explore whether the patient's language impairment and awareness of it affects the wellbeing of the people caring for them.

You will study patients' language impairments, as well as their awareness of these impairments. You will also study how carers perceive their patients’ impairment and explore their psychological wellbeing and quality of life, as these can affect the quality of care they provide.

You will then combine these two branches of research, studying whether the patient's awareness of their impairments affects the relation between aphasia severity and the carers own wellbeing. To our knowledge, no studies have combined psycho-social and cognitive studies of aphasia this way.

Apply to study outcome after stroke: survivors and their carers (full-time)

Apply to study outcome after stroke: survivors and their carers (part-time)

Supervisors: Dr Ian van der Linde; Dr Michael Wilby

A topic of considerable interest is how positions concerning free will may be interpreted in an era of increasingly advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Free will can be defined as the ability to have done otherwise: having made a decision to take an action, was it possible for us to have chosen to take a different action, such that the decision was up to the chooser?

Some positions include: (i) that brains follow the deterministic laws of physics so free will cannot exist (hard determinism); (ii) that physics comprises deterministic laws and probabilistic processes (quantum mechanics) but free will still cannot exist since probabilistic processes are likewise not under our control (hard incompatibilism); (iii) that brains are deterministic/probabilistic, but that free will (often redefined, such as simply requiring that we are reasons-responsive or that we can act independently of coercion) exists via unknown, possibly emergent, mechanisms (compatibilism); and (iv) that brains can initiate new thoughts ab initio, independently of deterministic and/or indeterministic physics, via unknown mechanisms or dualism (libertarianism).

The applicant will develop a proposal examining how AI on deterministic computers, which increasingly provide a simulacrum of human reasoning, can inform this debate and how the positions outlined above might be applied to computational intelligence.

Apply to study AI and the free will debate (full-time)

Apply to study AI and the free will debate (part-time)

Supervisors: Dr Pamela Knight-Davidson; Nicola Gillin ([email protected]); Prof Melanie Bell

NHS staff and patients are extremely diverse, culturally and linguistically. In this environment, effective communication requires cultural and linguistic competence.

Currently, the UK Standards Framework for Nursing Education requires nursing students to have training in equality and diversity. However, there is comparatively little research into intercultural nursing training from a linguistic perspective.

This project will investigate the effects of language use in cross-cultural nursing within NHS clinical settings, through observation, role play, interviews or a combination of methods. The aim is to provide an evidence base to underpin simulation-based intercultural competence training; such training will develop knowledge, skills and attitudes that promote more inclusive clinical nursing and interprofessional interactions, hence improve health outcomes for diverse patient groups.

The topic invites candidates to be a catalyst for change, by effecting better clinical outcomes and reducing health disparities.

Apply to study intercultural communication in NHS nursing (full-time)

Apply to study intercultural communication in NHS nursing (part-time)

Supervisors: Dr Nadeeshani Wanigarathna; Prof Denise Hawkes; Ejiro Esohwode ([email protected])

UK local authorities use the Flood and Coastal Risk Management Grant in Aid (FCERM GiA) tool to assess the losses avoided from alternative flood risk management projects. The tool uses a heavily generalised monetary value for average flood damage per house(hold) for the calculation of direct loss.

Social impact is calculated using the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). IMD provides deprivation per average of 750 households.

Decisions made based on data with low-spatial resolution fail to distinguish marginalised communities that need to be priorities for support. This research will establish an advanced methodology for local flood loss assessment by utilising advanced loss assessment methods and data with high-spatial resolution for both physical vulnerability (construction economics) and social vulnerability (socioeconomics).

Essex County Council (ECC) will be used as a case study area. The proposed methodology will be validated based on previous ECC works.

Apply to study advancing flood loss assessment economics (full-time)

Apply to study advancing flood loss assessment economics (part-time)

Supervisors: Prof Denise Hawkes; Xiaoxuan Jia

There has been a noticeable rise in the proportion of young adults with higher education qualification in the UK over the past 20 years. However, the proportion of graduates considered to be “underemployed” is estimated to be over one third, with females and graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds more badly affected.

This phenomenon has caught the attention of both policy makers and university administrators. Surveys of employers suggest that apart from structural issues in the labour market, a lack of soft skills and career resilience in graduates could be causing this.

This project assesses the efficacy of a unique student employability initiative from a post-92 university in improving students’ employability skills and career resilience. We adopt a mixed method approach, utilising individual level student administrative data, as well as structured surveys of students post-graduation.

Apply to study developing graduates’ labour market resilience (full-time)

Apply to study developing graduates’ labour market resilience (part-time)

Supervisors: Prof Marie-Pierre Moreau; Dr Sarah Burch

The ageing of populations in Europe and beyond has transformed intergenerational relations. Young caregivers are increasingly likely to provide informal care to older relatives or friends.

This scholarship explores the experiences of young adults living in the UK who are in formal education (i.e. in higher education or doing an apprenticeship) and providing informal care to older relatives or friends.

Theoretically, the proposal is grounded in the models of social justice developed by Nancy Fraser and Kathleen Lynch. Methodologically, it draws on a range of qualitative methods, such as interviews, ethnographic approaches, and/or art-based research.

The project is linked to Intergenerational Care Relations (InterCare), an international project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (2024-2028). The applicant will be pursuing a PhD while working alongside international experts and ECRs researching intergenerational care relations.

Apply to study young adults – intergenerational care and education (full-time)

Apply to study young adults – intergenerational care and education (part-time)

Supervisors: Prof Aled Jones; Dr Ying Wang

In its 2023 Global Risks Report, the World Economic Forum ranked biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as its fourth global risk in terms of both severity and impact in the long run.

The loss of biodiversity poses a critical threat to ecosystem health, jeopardizing vital services such as pollination of food crops, water treatment, carbon sequestration, fertile soil and woodland. These risks should be taken into account across the finance sector, where investments are the backbone of economic growth.

This PhD will investigate best practices in biodiversity finance, in particular within public-private partnerships, both nationally and internationally exploring opportunities to improve biodiversity finance in the future to inform policy development and the establishment of future investment mechanisms.

The project may encompass a variety of social science approaches. It is anticipated methods will include interviews, observations (anthropology), field notes, case studies and workshops.

Apply to study biodiversity finance for sustainable outcomes (full-time)

Apply to study biodiversity finance for sustainable outcomes (part-time)