The South East Doctoral Training Arc (SEDarc) is a partnership of six leading UK universities funded by the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC), which offers world-class postgraduate research training in the social sciences.
SEDarc aims to:
- Offer outstanding research training that propels discovery and fosters innovation in our region, nationally, and globally
- Equip researchers to thrive in challenge-led, collaborative, and interdisciplinary contexts through a portfolio of specialist research training, highly transferable digital and data skills training, and research in practice experiences that promote knowledge exchange and impact.
As such, the studentship offered by SEDarc is for 3.5 years but 3 months should be spent in a placement to develop career-relevant skills.
2025/26 rates for stipend are £21,237. This includes £2,000 London Allowance.
Please note that the studentship does not cover flights, visa, or health surcharge costs.
If you are interested in pursuing a PhD with SEDarc studentship, please contact a potential supervisor as soon as possible.
Eligibility
To apply for a PhD studentship provided by SEDarc, you must first identify a research supervisor who you would like to work with, and they must agree to supervise you. You will find a list of research projects from our supervisory teams below. Please get in touch directly with the potential supervisors with whom you would like to work.
International students (whether EU or overseas) are eligible and RHUL will cover the difference between home fees and international fees.
It is possible to apply for the studentship even if you have not or will not have completed a MSc or an equivalent degree. In this case, the studentship typically runs for 4.5 years (the 1 + 3.5 route), but a candidate with the required skills could apply for the 3.5 route.
Please contact Dr. Shiri Lev-Ari (co-PGR Lead and SEDarc Management Committee) for further information about SEDarc, or if you would like to be introduced to members of the academic staff.
Deadline to apply for SEDarc studentships: January 6th, 2025 (9am).
Shortlisted candidates will be invited for an interview on January 13-14th, 2025.
The application should be made through the RHUL website.
Please also find the SEDarc application form and more detail about the application processes.
Changes in Adolescents Studying Abroad towards Promotion of Diversity and Inclusivity: A Focus on Their Values and Behaviour
Prof. Anat Bardi (primary supervisor), Dr. Matteo Lisi (secondary supervisor)
The intuitions of organisations managing adolescent student exchanges are that this experience leads to later promotion of diversity and inclusivity, with supportive anecdotal evidence. Our initial longitudinal study suggests a more complex picture. The project will be informed by our initial findings and use our connections with such organisations to examine the process of change throughout and after the experience, focusing on value and behaviour change, using longitudinal surveys and possibly interviews and intervention studies. Excellent achievements in prior statistics training is required, and fluency in another European language is an advantage. For more information about the primary supervisor, see here.
The influence of psychological biases on technological progress
Dr. Shiri Lev-Ari (primary supervisor), Prof. Ryan McKay (secondary supervisor)
Picture this: you've spent a lot of money on tickets for an outdoor concert. When the day finally arrives, the weather is terrible—strong winds and snow make it miserable to be outside. Would you still go? Research suggests that you likely would, even though you'd probably turn down free tickets if you hadn’t already paid for them. This is an example of sunk cost bias, the undue influence of past investment on decisions. This bias can have a large effect on technological innovations and progress, yet research on cultural evolution that investigates technological progress ignores such biases. This PhD project will use experiments to examine how social and cultural factors influence people's vulnerability to the sunk cost bias, and consequently, technological progress. For more information about the primary supervisor, see here.
Learning to read
Prof. Kathy Rastle (primary supervisor), secondary supervisor TBD
Learning to read is the most important outcome of primary schooling. It brings knowledge, employment, and prosperity to an individual; high levels of literacy at a societal level also contribute to poverty reduction and economic growth. This PhD studentship will focus on some aspect of how children learn to read but will be tailored to the student’s interests and expertise. Projects may be focused on English but may also focus on writing systems that differ from English in important ways (e.g. Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew). Likewise, while projects may be focused on learning to read in high-income, largely monolingual settings such as England, it would be possible to develop a project tackling the special challenges of learning to read in a low- and middle-income country, particularly where a child may be learning to read in a language that they do not know. This project will be conducted with appropriate partner organisations (e.g. schools, literacy charities, international development agencies), and the second supervisor will be selected according to the particular focus of the project.
What can we learn about human language comprehension from Alexa and Siri?
Prof. Kathy Rastle (primary supervisor), Prof. Chris Watkins (secondary supervisor)
The last five years has seen an explosion of progress in building large language models such as Alexa and Siri able to mimic aspects of human language behaviour. However, there has been very limited interaction between the engineers and computer scientists building these models and psychologists studying aspects of human language understanding. This project will focus on some aspect of the interface between large language models (typically used for engineering applications) and human language understanding but will be tailored to the student’s interests and expertise. One avenue would be for students to uncover the similarities and differences between large language models and human language understanding; for example, how do humans and large language models generalise their knowledge to unfamiliar situations? The other avenue would be for students to investigate how large language models can be used to improve the accessibility of text for individuals with low literacy or for children who struggle to learn to read; for example, through the use of summarisation tools or by parsing text automatically into meaningful elements. These would both be cross-disciplinary projects conducted in collaboration with experts from the Department of Computer Science. Students would require very strong quantitative and programming skills.
Social Norm Emergence and its Social Dynamics
Dr. Gabriele Bellucci (primary supervisor), Prof. Ryan McKay (secondary supervisor)
Social norms are behavioural guidelines providing expectations for individual choices and inferences about others’ likely future behaviour. This way, social norms can be thought of as simplifying heuristics to help decision-makers to navigate the world. Some norms are strictly social and regulate how individuals behave in social settings (e.g., dress code); others refer to a moral or religious dimension and rely on societal beliefs (e.g., life is sacred and humans should be used as an end and not a means); still others represent more practical advice about what should be done that turns out to have some biologically rational (e.g., food prohibition). Adherence to these norms can be motivated by societal expectations or enforced through governmental measures. The prevailing literature primarily concentrates on treating social norms as a collective entity or delving into specific facets of these norms. This project makes a distinctive contribution by investigating the dynamics of norm adoption within a social group from an individual perspective.
The general question is: What does it take for a social norm to get established?
Different aspects are relevant to this question: How beneficial should a behaviour be for a social group to be adopted by its group members? How easy should its adoption be for the social members to be able to adopt it? How many social members need to agree with adopting that behaviour for it to become the norm? Is a belief change required for a behaviour change or does a belief change simply facilitate its establishment in a society?
This project will be both theoretical and experimental, will involve the development of experimental tasks in combination with computational modelling analyses, and will investigate the questions above in relation to group norms in general and in particular (e.g., environmental concerns and behaviour change for more sustainable living).