Royal Holloway Social Purpose CDT

Department of Economics

Dr Gabriel Facchini and Professor Arnaud Chevalier

Learning, School Starting Age and Children's Mental Health

Mental ill health among children and young people has risen sharply, and doing badly at school is one of its strongest correlates. What is not known is which way the causation runs. Struggling in the classroom may damage wellbeing; poor mental health certainly damages attainment. The distinction matters for policy: if what children learn genuinely protects their mental health, then teaching quality and school readiness become instruments of public health, not only of education.

The project separates cause from correlation by exploiting changes in the English school system — past reforms to how children are taught, and the rules that decide when they start school. Changes of this kind shift children's learning for reasons that have nothing to do with their mental health, which is what makes it possible to ask what learning itself does. We have particular sources of variation in mind and will discuss them with the student, who will also have scope to propose their own.

Three questions follow. Does better early attainment reduce later mental ill health? Are any effects short-lived or lasting? And who is affected — by deprivation, sex and special educational need?

The student will work with ECHILD (Education and Child Health Insights from Linked Data), which joins the school records of every child in state education in England to their hospital, mental health service and mortality records — millions of children who can be followed from the day they start school into adulthood. Training in secure-data research and the necessary accreditation form part of the first year.

We are looking for a student with a strong quantitative background in economics or a related social science, comfortable with Stata, R or Python, and interested in applied microeconometrics and large administrative datasets. Prior experience with linked data is welcome but not required. Informal enquiries are encouraged.

Department of Music, Drama and Media Arts

Dr Emma Cox

Reparative cultural practices; migration; humanitarianism

Cross-disciplinary public culture and arts practice engaged with social justice, reparation, and rights; particularly work associated with migration and public humanitarianism associated with irregular migration. Interested in projects that explore the intersection of arts practice and other public fora including humanitarian policy, commemoration, reparation. Geographical scope: open to proposals that examine regional practices in a comparative context, or are situated locally. Also open to projects concerning colonial acquisition histories and decolonial practices including museum repatriation.

Department of Music, Drama and Media Arts

Professor Mark Berry

Opera/Western art music, politics, and society

Relationship of opera and Western art music - broadly considered, e.g. work, staging, audiences, reception, aesthetics, social/economic/politicalimpact - to politics and society. My own particular interests include Mozart, Wagner, modernism, the Enlightenment, German idealism, Marx and Western Marxism, contemporary (and historical) opera staging, and Adorno, but these are indicative and I am happy to consider other projects, including those relating to other, related fields.

Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy 

Professor Jennifer Piscopo 

Care Politics and Policy in Comparative Perspective

Professor Jennifer Piscopo is Professor of Politics and Gender in the Department of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy, and Director of the Gender Institute. She is also co-lead of the CaRI (Care, Rights, and Inclusion) Project, and invites PhD applicants interested in studying care policy. CaRI examines policy innovations that increase state provisioning of care services, with particular emphasis on policies that operationalize and implement a human right to care and/or expand the rights and social inclusion of unpaid carers, especially women. In August 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued Consultative Opinion 31, declaring care a human right, and Latin American countries signed the Tlatelolco Commitment, which sets a ten-year deadline for countries to advance towards ‘caring societies’. In parallel, carers’ rights movements in Europe, including the UK, have increasingly mobilized around—and won—policies such as rights to respite for unpaid carers. These developments raise multiple normative and empirical research questions about care movements’ strategies and about care policies’ design, development, and effectiveness.

Potential PhD projects can include:
- Theoretical and conceptual analyses of the evolving international and regional normative frameworks and jurisprudence around the human right to care and the idea of becoming ‘caring societies’
- Qualitative examinations of how feminist political economic theories about unwaged work and care and/or co-responsibility for care become translated into international and/or domestic policy conversations
- Case studies of carers’ rights movements and their influence over policy and practice
- Projects may be global, regional, comparative, or single case. Europe and the Americas are priority areas of investigation, but candidates may also propose projects related to care policy and practice in East Asia or Africa.

Department of Geography & Sociology

Professor Sylvia Walby 

Violence and society

Reducing violence is the social purpose of this area of research for a PhD. Reducing violence would reduce harm, reduce inequalities, and increase individual and societal well-being. Projects are invited in the broad area of violence and society. Issues of gender equality and of measurement are of particular interest. The central discipline is Sociology, broadly defined.
A wide range of research projects are possible. Projects could address policy issues, aligned with the government’s new strategy to halve violence against women and girls in ten years. They could be engaged with the practitioners in Third Sector organisations seeking to help survivors of violence to stop violence and rebuild their lives. They could focus on the implications of different ways of intervening in intersecting inequalities of gender, race, migration, and class. They could focus on emerging forms of violence and coercion. They could develop new concepts to interpret changing forms of violence. They could address the intersection of the authoritarian turn with policies concerning violence. They could be at a macro scale, comparing alternative ways of organising society that produce less rather than more violence. Theories of violence are contested in the social sciences: the PhD could contribute to the resolution of theoretical dilemmas that have practical consequences for policy and practice to reduce violence, especially against women and girls. The research findings should be translatable into something relevant for societal change, including policy and practice audiences.
A variety of methodologies are possible, quantitative, qualitative, or comparative. This could include the development of data and measurement practices. The development of methodological skills would be an important part of the PhD and useful for the future of the applicant and their contribution to the world. The research should be intended to have a specific identifiable social purpose.

Department of English & Modern Languages

Dr Helen Kingstone and Dr Karina Lickorish Quinn

How can intergenerational and/or intercultural creative practice be used in community settings to improve inclusion and community cohesion?

Research that can bridge intergenerational and intercultural divides is urgently needed in Britain, to improve social cohesion and address inequalities. This project combines creative methods with intergenerational practice in intercultural communities. It asks: how do we, across generations and across cultures, come together to create a shared vision of Britain that includes everybody?

Dr Helen Kingstone’s research shows that the intergenerational practice sector needs to access more effectively the intangible heritage that both younger and older people bring to their encounters. Dr Karina Lickorish Quinn’s research demonstrates the need to invite children’s diverse linguistic and cultural heritages into the classroom to welcome children’s authentic selves and improve intercultural understanding.

Research has shown that creative methods are powerful in facilitating authentic sharing across boundaries (Kara 2015). Kingstone’s and Lickorish Quinn’s pilot research has already shown the value of methods including visualised life-narratives (Hall, Kingstone and King 2024) and multilingual poetry-writing (Barbour and Lickorish Quinn 2020).
The project could study how creative methods can best strengthen any of: (a) the capability of the intergenerational practice sector to achieve their community-cohesion aims, (b) schools’ recognition of the value of multilingualism, (c) immigrant families’ inclusion and belonging, (d) younger and older people’s understanding of the intercultural heritage of others beyond their own family and community.

This will be supported through supervisors’ partnerships with intergenerational practice charities including Gen-All, and with community organisations that support migrant communities in England to celebrate, preserve and pass on their cultural heritage, such as Latin American House, the Indoamerican Refugee and Migrant Organisation, and Comunidad Rimanakuy.

Department of English & Modern Languages

Dr Katie McGettigan

Growing Environmental Histories of the Book at Kew Gardens

RHUL and RBG Kew invite expressions of interest for a PhD project that use Kew’s rare book collections (including, but not limited to, pre-1800 imprints, limited editions, and finely illustrated works) to pursue two interlinked research questions:

1. How can we write environmental histories of individual books and/or collections at Kew? How can we trace the humans and non-humans (plants, weather, climate) that participated in their production, acquisition, storage, and organisation? What were the environmental impacts of Kew’s book collecting, and how did environmental processes and conditions interact with the individual, institutional and imperial agendas that shaped Kew’s library as the institution emerged as an intellectual and scientific hub?
2. How can we make these environmental histories of books visible for Kew’s staff, library users, and wider publics through cataloguing practices and public engagement? How can environmental histories of books contribute to the decolonization of archives, libraries, and catalogues at Kew and, through the sharing of best practice, in the wider GLAM sector?

The project would be co-designed by prospective students and supervisors from RHUL and RBG Kew. The research should drive forward social change through, for example: influencing collections’ policies and cataloguing practices; shaping public conversations about environmental stewardship; participatory research involving Kew’s diasporic partners. The project will include a 3-month placement in Kew’s Library and Archives.

Project outcomes may include:

Developing new methodologies for combining archival book history research with theoretical work in new materialism and plant humanities
Embedding environmental histories, including traditional knowledges, in Kew’s Library catalogue in ways that support Kew’s diverse user communities, including through public engagement projects
Producing and disseminating guidelines for the GLAM sector around the preservation and discoverability of environmental collections’ histories
We welcome interest from students with backgrounds in Cultural History/Geographies, History of the Book, History of Science, Environmental Humanities, Ethnobotany, Museum Studies, Libraries and Information Sciences.

Business School

Dr Gul Berna Ozcan

AI and SMEs; Political Economy of Business; Migrant & Refugee Entrepreneurship; New Business Models & Precarious Work

AI and SMEs: In what way AI adoption affects organisations and workers; how supply chains operate; how AI shapes managerial power and labour within and beyond the firm.
Political Economy of Business: How businesses engage with political leaders and parties; in what way firms benefit or lose market value due to their political ties; empirical contexts can be geographical or industry-specific through qualitative or quantitative research.
Migrant & Refugee Entrepreneurship: How migrants and refugees create and grow businesses; the role of institutions, networks and resources in shaping entrepreneurial outcomes; implications for integration, inclusion and economic development. This can be analysed within a cross-country or regional context.
New Business Models & Precarious Work: How digital platforms and emerging business models reshape employment relations; the causes and consequences of insecure work; implications for worker welfare, regulation and organisational performance.

Business School

Dr Yiannis Anagnostopoulos

Fintech, M&As, Financial Regulation, Banking

Candidates in the above named areas and in the behavioural finance domain are welcome. In particular, investigation on the social impact of the above named areas and/or a combination on the interaction of such areas is particularly sought after.

Business School

Dr Anastasios Evgenidis

Macroeconomics of AI, Money and Geopolitics

This project takes an applied macroeconomic approach to studying how today's major forces (AI-driven automation, monetary policy shifts, and geopolitical fragmentation) are reshaping output, inflation, employment, and financial stability. Using empirical macro methods and real-world data, the research aims to understand how these forces interact and transmit through the economy, and what this means for policy design around monetary policy, trade, taxation, and the welfare state. The project speaks to a core social purpose challenge: ensuring economic security and inclusive growth amid technological change and global uncertainty. Suitable for candidates in economics or quantitative social science with an interest in applied macro and policy. Enquiries on related topics, including central bank policy, geopolitical risk, and AI's economic effects, are also welcome.

Business School

Dr Ioana Jipa-Musat

Political economy; economic geography; development; international business

I welcome enquiries from potential applicants interested in working with me on projects within, or at the intersection of, my core research areas:
- political economy of the firm and industrial transformation
- labour regimes and global production networks/global value chains
- international migration and development

I am particularly interested in projects that engage critically with questions of labour, firms, industrial transformation, global production, migration and development, including research that bridges these areas.

Business School

Dr Xingyu (Cynthia) Huang

AI-mediated decision-making, Digital influence, Consumer experiences, health and well-being

I welcome research proposals exploring how artificial intelligence and digital technologies, including AI-generated or AI-mediated information, recommendations, summaries, disclosures, social media, and digital interfaces shape consumer perceptions, judgments, trust, decision-making, and experiences. A second area focuses on consumer experience health and well-being. This may include questions around psychological, emotional, social, or physical well-being; transformative or meaningful consumption experiences; healthy consumer decision-making; and the ways in which consumption, services, and everyday experiences can enhance or undermine well-being.

Business School

Professor Paul Robson

Entrepreneurial learning

I am interested in most areas of research on entrepreneurship. I am particularly interested in entrepreneurial learning; growth and the influence of geographical location; exporting; family businesses and issues related to succession planning; innovation broadly defined but especially disruptive or novel; and, business advice and support, as well as networking. The methodology can be quantitative or qualitative or mixed methods. The units investigated can profit maximisers or they can be social enterprises pursuing a variety of objectives.

Business School

Professor Philip Wu

AI adoption and inequality, Digital labour platforms, Gig economy, Sociomateriality of digital tech

My research interests span two interconnected areas.

The first concerns technology (AI) adoption and inequality. I am interested in how people adopt and use AI-enabled technologies in everyday life, for example for health self-management, and how differences in access, capabilities, trust, and use may exacerbate or reduce existing social and health inequalities. In the workplace, I am interested in how new technologies differentially affects tasks, skills, and occupational roles, and how these changes create uneven opportunities and risks for different workers. Potential research questions include: Who benefits from AI adoption and who may be disadvantaged? How does AI reshape tasks and occupations differently across groups? Under what conditions might new technologies widen or narrow existing inequalities?

The second area focuses on the sociomateriality of digital technology, particularly digital labour platforms, gig work, and algorithmic management. I am interested in how workers’ practices, agency, and lived experiences interact with evolving platform technologies and algorithmic forms of management. Potential questions include: How do gig workers adapt to, negotiate, or resist algorithmic management? How do platforms and workers mutually shape changing patterns of work? How does the evolution of digital platforms affect worker autonomy, wellbeing, identity, and everyday working experiences?

I particularly welcome projects that connect these areas by investigating how AI, algorithms, workers, and organisational practices interact to shape agency, opportunities, and inequalities. I also welcome enquiries on related topics concerning AI adoption, digital work, platforms, and the broader social consequences of digital transformation.

Business School

Dr Saffet Aras Uygur

Fraud, charity accountability, ethics, accountability, governance

Students are also welcome to explore related topics concerning fraud, fraud risk, ethical issues within organisations, ethical governance, transparency, financial accountability, organisational culture, regulation, whistleblowing, stakeholder trust among many others.

Business School

Professor Hui Tan

Research area: Platform Envelopment and Micro-Multinational Survival Potential topic: Asymmetric Ecosystem Strategies: How Emerging Market Micro-Multinationals Counter Platform Envelopment in Cross-Border E-Commerce

Title: Asymmetric Ecosystem Strategies: How Emerging Market Micro-Multinationals Counter Platform Envelopment in Cross-Border E-Commerce.
Research Focus: Examines how small firms maintain strategic autonomy, customer data ownership, and brand equity when entering global markets through dominant platform ecosystems (e.g., Amazon, Temu, Shopify).
Key Research Questions: What dynamic capabilities enable developing-country SMEs to multi-home or "de-platformize" after achieving initial global scale? How do small firms leverage local AI tools to reduce platform dependency?

Business School

Professor G. 'Hari' Harindranath

Empowering marginalised groups (particularly, migrant workers) through digital technologies; Digitalisation of labour migration management particularly in the Global South

Digital tech and migration are inextricably linked. While marginalised groups such as migrant workers increasingly depend on digital tech for information and orientation as well as affective reasons, they are also subject to digitalisation by a range of actors including governments, recruitment agencies, employers, and even humanitarian organisations. Migrant workers often have limited digital capacity to navigate these digital spaces and rarely have access to mechanisms for recourse when they are subject to unfair digital practices including using AI technologies. I welcome projects at the intersection of digital tech and migration and digital tech and vulnerability, particularly, but not exclusively, in Global South contexts; and the implications of digital transformation and AI for labour migration governance.

Business School

Dr Maria Simosi

Career sustainability; career transitions and employment relations in crisis environment; customized work arrangements

I am particularly interested in examining how environmental changes influence career trajectories across different workforce populations, with a particular emphasis on vulnerable groups.

Business School

Dr Susan O'Leary

Accounting, accountability and social purpose

I am interested in supervising research examining the relationships between accounting, accountability and social purpose. This includes exploring how accounting (understood broadly as practices of measuring, categorising, reporting and making activities visible) shapes how social and environmental problems are understood and addressed. I welcome proposals investigating how accountability is constructed and experienced within organisations, communities and wider society. Relevant questions might concern who is expected to account for social or environmental harms; whose knowledge and experiences are recognised; how particular people or issues become visible or remain overlooked; and how established understandings of accountability may be challenged or reimagined. The broad social purpose of this research area is to understand the role that accounting and accountability play in responding to pressing social and environmental challenges, and to consider how they might contribute to more inclusive, equitable and sustainable forms of organisation and social change.

Potential areas of interest include sustainability and climate justice, activism and social movements, NGOs and humanitarian organisations, inequality and marginalisation, community-led initiatives and decolonial approaches to accounting and accountability. These areas are indicative rather than prescriptive, and I would also welcome enquiries concerning related topics. I am particularly interested in critical, qualitative, ethnographic and participatory research, although the precise theoretical approach, research question and empirical context would be developed with the successful applicant according to their interests.

Business School

Professor Sameer Hosany

Consumer Psychology for an Inclusive and Responsible Digital Society

Digital technologies increasingly shape how people access information, make decisions, interact with organisations and experience everyday life. While these developments create significant opportunities, they also raise important questions around inclusion, wellbeing, vulnerability, trust and autonomy.

I am interested in supervising PhD research that examines how digital technologies affect different groups of consumers and how they can be developed and used to support more inclusive, responsible and socially beneficial outcomes.

Potential areas of interest include how digital technologies influence wellbeing, decision-making and autonomy; whether digital environments reduce or reinforce inequalities; which consumers may be particularly vulnerable to persuasion, misinformation or exclusion; and how trust, transparency and authenticity influence responses in digital settings. I am also interested in how consumer psychology can inform responsible business practice, consumer protection and public policy.

Relevant contexts may include social media, digital advertising, online consumer experiences, personalised technologies, virtual influencers, technology-enabled services, tourism and other service settings, and rapidly evolving technologies such as generative AI.

These interests build on my current PhD supervision in related areas of consumer psychology, digital technologies, wellbeing and responsible marketing.

I welcome applications using experimental, survey, mixed-method and systematic review approaches, as well as computational and data-driven methods such as topic modelling, text analytics and machine learning.

Business School

Dr Hsing-Fen Lee

Corporate social responsibility, global grand challenges and open science

Globally we are facing several challenges such as neurodegenerative disease, cancer, climate change and AI transformation. These are complex problems requiring interdisciplinary, inter-organisational collaborations among diverse stakeholders such as universities, industrial firms and government or non-profit organisations. Because solutions to these challenges are largely unknown, fundamental research from universities and government support is required. Firms entering such collaborations must be motivated by a responsibility to find breakthrough solutions for social benefit rather than immediate commercial returns. A recent movement suggests that, in this context, collaborations between industrial firms and universities can based on an "open science" logic, emphasising knowledge as a public good to speed innovation diffusion, rather than follow conventional proprietary innovation models. The proposed research explores this proposition and asks the following research questions:
1. How might firms that participate in open science collaborations with universities be characterised?
2. How do these firms play a role in accelerating the diffusion of innovation resulted from the collaborations?
The research is timely as global investment in R&D has increased yet the research productivity has declined. The UK government invests over £8 billion annually in public research and the conversion of public science into private innovation is a central concern of UK industrial strategy. The research interrogates the return of publicly funded research on addressing global grand challenges and the role of industrial firms.
The research will link data of patents, industrial firms, publicly funded research and global scholarly work to answer the research questions. By addressing the scholarly and policy debates in the effectiveness of publicly funded research, and by developing a novel dataset integrating research output with industry innovation, the research advances our knowledge in innovation management, sustainability, and an emerging field that utilises big data to address societal problems.

Law School

Dr Farrah Raza 

The Regulation of Medical Devices

The Regulation of Medical Devices, Digital Health & Telemedicine
The regulatory landscape for medical devices is evolving rapidly, both in the UK and internationally. Advances in medical innovation, digital health technologies, and telemedicine have created new opportunities while raising important regulatory, legal, and practical challenges for clinicians, patients, and stakeholders.
Dr Farrah Raza welcomes research project proposals exploring developments in the areas of medical device regulation, digital devices, and telemedicine. This includes the use of predictive AI technologies. Potential projects should examine emerging regulatory challenges, technological innovation, clinical practice, patient autonomy and rights or the broader implications of changing regulatory frameworks. Legal doctrinal or socio-legal /empirical projects are both welcome.
There is an expectation to collaborate with appropriate research partners.
Related project ideas are also welcomed, and prospective applicants are encouraged to get in touch to discuss potential projects.

Department of Physical Sciences and Engineering

Professor Martin King

The reflectivity of sea ice as a function of its evolution and light absorbing impurities: Radiative forcing for climate change and BRDF for Earth Observation

Sea ice plays a vital role in the Earth system, regulating how much solar energy is reflected back to space and how much is absorbed by the polar environment. However, impurities such as black carbon, volcanic ash and mineral dust can darken sea ice, reducing its reflectivity (albedo) and potentially accelerating polar change. Understanding these processes is important for climate prediction, Earth Observation and monitoring our rapidly changing polar regions.

This interdisciplinary Social Purpose PhD will investigate how the reflectivity of sea ice changes as it evolves and as light-absorbing impurities accumulate. You will explore how impurity concentration, temperature, thickness and the changing structure of sea ice influence the way light is reflected, absorbed and transmitted.

The project combines laboratory experiments, field observations and modelling. You will produce sea ice under controlled conditions in refrigerated tanks, making optical measurements alongside measurements of ice temperature, brine content and microstructure. There may also be opportunities for field observations in Svalbard, studying natural sea ice and snow-covered sea ice through the seasonal transition from winter to summer, including melt ponds.

Your observations will be used to develop and validate radiative-transfer models that quantify changes in albedo, energy absorption and light reaching the ocean beneath the ice. The work will also contribute to improved interpretation of satellite and Earth Observation data.

A key feature of this PhD is its 50/50 academic–industry partnership with Arctic Research and Development (ARD). You will spend significant time working alongside ARD, gaining experience of applying scientific research to real-world Arctic challenges. The partnership provides access to specialist laboratories, engineering expertise, technology development and potentially field deployments in Svalbard, giving you the opportunity to work at the interface of science, engineering and Arctic technology.

You will gain transferable skills in experimental design, optical measurements, fieldwork, programming, data analysis, modelling and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Applicants from Physics, Engineering, Chemistry or Earth Sciences are encouraged to apply. Previous experience in programming, modelling, laboratory work, spectroscopy or fieldwork is advantageous but not essential.

Department of Physical Sciences and Engineering

Dr Onyema Nduka and Dr Khuong An Nguyen

Climate Resilient and Secure Microgrids for Powering AI Data Centres

The accelerated growth of AI data centres presents significant challenges to all segments (generation, transmission and distribution) of legacy electricity networks. In many countries, these infrastructures are already operating close to their physical/engineering capacities; combined with the urgent need to deeply decarbonise the electricity sector through uptake of renewable energy technologies, microgrids (smaller electrical networks comprising generation and distribution but no transmission infrastructure) are an important solution. Nevertheless, stakeholders (academia/industry) agree that new approaches and tools are needed to plan and operate resilient and secure renewable-energy intensive microgrids for AI data centres in this era of climate-change-related uncertainties (e.g., extreme temperatures).

Thus, this project will develop novel/innovative models, frameworks and tools to ensure that critical infrastructures like microgrids for AI data centres are resilient to climate-change uncertainties and are future-proofed to withstand outages of electrical assets (i.e., secure operation).

Anchored on our past works on physics-informed graph attention networks and uncertainty quantification, this project will deploy advanced hybrid physics-data-driven techniques to construct models, develop frameworks and software tools for climate-resilient microgrids powering AI data centres. MATLAB/Simulink, Python and GAMS software will be adopted for this research.

The project aligns with College’s Social Purpose CDT and UKRI’s Net Zero Digital Infrastructure & Energy Streams as it sits at intersection of sustainability, energy resilience, net-zero infrastructure, and digital compute.

The successful candidate will also engage with industry partners: Data & Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure (DAFNI) and TNEI Services Ltd with opportunity of a 3-month placement.

Interested applicants with a first class bachelors & masters (preferably in engineering: electrical power systems, power electronics; applied mathematics or equivalent) or those with upper second class (and relevant industry experience) should email their research proposal, latest CV and peer-reviewed journal/conference publications (desired but not essential) to Onyema.Nduka@rhul.ac.uk and copy Khuong.Nguyen@rhul.ac.uk for informal chat.

Department of Psychology 

Dr Nicholas Furl

Individual differences in eyewitness face identification: towards more reliable identification procedures

People vary substantially in their ability to recognise and identify unfamiliar faces. This project will investigate the cognitive sources of these individual differences and ask how face-identification procedures can be designed to remain reliable across people with very different abilities.

Using controlled behavioural experiments, the project will examine performance in police-style identity line-ups alongside other unfamiliar-face identification and matching tasks. It will investigate the extent to which performance depends on general cognitive ability, general visual and object-recognition abilities, and abilities specific to face perception and memory. This approach will also allow the project to ask whether apparently distinct face-processing abilities make different contributions to successful identification.

A further focus will be confidence and metacognition. Do people know how good they are at recognising faces? Does confidence provide a reliable indication of accuracy across individuals with different underlying abilities? Understanding these relationships may help establish when confidence is informative and how identification procedures might be designed to minimise predictable errors across a heterogeneous witness population.

The project will combine experimental psychology with psychometrics and latent-variable modelling. Depending on the student’s interests, there will also be optional opportunities to use modern computer-vision or deep-learning models to compare human and machine face representations and investigate which properties of faces and identification displays predict errors.

The broader aim is to improve understanding of the sources of face-identification errors and contribute to the development and interpretation of fairer and more reliable identification procedures. Related proposals in face recognition, eyewitness identification or individual differences would also be welcome.

Department of Psychology 

Dr Nura Sidarus

Reducing inequalities in access to treatments for depressive symptoms

Depression affects 1 in 10 people in the UK, with higher rates in young people, and growing rates in recent years. Only 1 in 3 adults with a common mental health problem are getting treatment; even after attempting several treatments, about 1/3 of individuals remain unwell. Moreover, there are significant inequalities in symptom prevalence as well as treatment access (by e.g. socioeconomic status, ethnicity, geography). Given its high economic and societal burden, it is imperative to better understand how to reduce these inequalities and increase access to effective treatments. Yet, one key barrier to progress remains the gap between research and clinical practice and policy, hindering the translation of evidence-based treatments into clinical practice, and restricting access to existing treatments.

This research project could involve work across:

A. Gathering evidence on existing inequalities in treatment access for common mental health problems, e.g.:
- Leveraging existing data sources (electronic health records, other health datasets) to investigate access to specific treatments.
- Collecting new data on treatment access (and barriers to it), focused on specific target groups (e.g. those with specific symptom profiles; difficult-to-treat depression).

B. Investigating barriers in translation of research to clinical practice and policy making:
- Identifying barriers in clinical practice to moving from diagnostic-centred to person-centred, symptom-focused approaches in treatment allocation.
- Building an understanding of the UK’s complex ecosystem of clinical guidelines, to inform impact-driven research and uncover different opportunities for influencing policy and practice.

This work aims to leverage research for social benefit, and help reduce inequalities and widen access to evidence-based treatment options and choice for people living with depression and mental health problems.

I remain open to proposals in related topics, and particularly interested in applicants with a background in researching inequalities in (mental) health, epidemiological, qualitative or co-production research methods.

Department of Computing, Security and Mathematics

Professor Li Zhang

Audio-Visual Mental Health and Metabolic Disorder Detection Using LLMs and Evolving Transformers

Millions of people globally experience mental (e.g. depression and anxiety) and metabolic disorders. Mental and physical health conditions such as depression, dementia and heart conditions often affect individuals’ communication styles (e.g. changes in tone, pitch, pace, pause, energy, pronunciation, and word choice) and behaviour patterns (e.g. social withdrawal, loss of motivation, fatigue, slowed movements, repetitive actions, agitation/restlessness, disturbed sleep or appetite). Early detection and intervention can significantly improve treatment outcomes, but the lack of an objective and effective detection method remains a major barrier.

To tackle the above issues, this project will develop novel deep learning algorithms, LLMs, and audio/vision transformers with various attention mechanisms, to identify early warnings of depression/anxiety, diabetes, dementia, heart failure and Parkinson’s disease using audio-visual inputs. Weakly supervised and zero/few-shot learning methods will also be exploited to classify unseen conditions without or with limited training samples, in order to tackle data sparsity issues. The proposed models will be comprehensively evaluated using existing public audio-visual emotion, depression, and medical disease datasets to ascertain their effectiveness.

Applicants should have the equivalent of a BSc (first-class) or MSc (distinction) degree from Computer Science/Engineering with research expertise in machine learning and deep learning. Applicants should have proficient programming skills in Python, MATLAB, and C++/Java. He/she should have good oral communication and academic writing skills. Relevant publication records would be advantageous. The selected candidate will be working with researchers from Computer Science, Medical and Social Sciences, with research support from DDM Health Ltd. and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

Applicants are encouraged to send their CVs, abstract and publications to Professor Li Zhang (li.zhang@rhul.ac.uk) for an informal discussion before completing online applications. Formal applications must be submitted through the University online application system after discussions with the supervisor.

Department of Computing, Security and Mathematics

Dr Anand Subramoney

Deep Learning

Artificial intelligence can help public, community and charitable organisations understand information, communicate with people and deliver services more effectively. Yet many current AI systems are expensive to run, consume substantial energy and depend on specialist technical resources. This can widen inequality: the organisations and communities that could benefit most may be least able to access them. This PhD will explore how to design AI that is smaller, more affordable and less energy-intensive, without losing its usefulness. The student will investigate approaches inspired by how biological systems process information efficiently, alongside modern methods for reducing the computing power needed by AI models. They will examine where resource-efficient AI could make the greatest social difference, such as in health, education or local support services, and assess the practical, environmental and equality implications of different approaches. The project will ask not only “can this technology work?” but also “who might benefit?”, “who might be excluded?” and “what would responsible use look like?” The exact application area and research questions will be developed with the student, allowing them to bring their own interests and experience to the project. During the PhD, the student will have the opportunity to undertake a placement or challenge-led activity with a relevant public, third-sector or community organisation, translating their research into practical insight. The project is suitable for applicants with an interest in technology and social impact.

Department of Computing, Security and Mathematics

Dr Yiannis Tselekounis

Societal and Cryptographic Aspects of Anonymity and Accountability in Protocol Security

Digital communication systems are central to how people interact, organize, and access information. Yet many platforms expose users to risks such as surveillance, profiling, and targeted harassment. This project aims to develop cryptographic protocols that support safer digital communication by combining strong security properties -- confidentiality, authenticity, anonymity, and accountable moderation -- with practical primitives such as secure messaging, key‑exchange mechanisms, and private information retrieval (PIR).

The technical component focuses on improving the state of the art in these primitives. We will study secure‑messaging protocols that maintain confidentiality and authenticity even after device compromise, and ratcheted key‑exchange mechanisms that provide post‑compromise security. Across these primitives, we will pay particular attention to the property of anonymity: hiding identities, communication patterns, and protocol metadata. The goal is to design protocols that achieve strong anonymity while remaining efficient and usable in real‑world communication settings.

In parallel, the project will examine how these security properties affect people’s lives. Anonymity can protect vulnerable users, enable free expression, and reduce risks of retaliation, but communities also need ways to handle abuse and maintain trust. We will study report‑based moderation mechanisms that allow users to flag harmful behavior without exposing sensitive information. Cryptographic tools such as anonymous credentials, privacy‑preserving reporting channels, and selective‑disclosure mechanisms will be explored as ways to support moderation without enabling broad surveillance.
To understand the social impact of these properties, we will analyze real‑world cases, interview experts and users, and study relevant court decisions involving privacy, anonymity, and digital communication. This interdisciplinary approach will help identify where cryptographic guarantees align with social needs and where new designs are required.

By combining advances in cryptographic protocol design with careful study of real‑world practice, the project aims to support communication systems that are both technically secure and socially responsible.

Department of Biological Sciences

Professor Paul Fraser

Transforming Nutritional Health Through Provitamin A biofortification of foods

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) remains an entrenched driver of morbidity and preventable mortality across sub Saharan Africa, disproportionately affecting children and women of reproductive age. Despite decades of supplementation and fortification programmes, structural gaps in coverage, affordability, and sustainability persist, particularly in rural and low income populations. There is an urgent need for food based, culturally embedded, and self-sustaining nutritional solutions that complement public health interventions.
Tomatoes represent a uniquely impactful dietary vehicle for provitamin A delivery: they are widely consumed daily; they underpin diverse dishes; and tomato paste, and puree are deeply integrated into African food cultures. Yet current varieties contain only minimal β carotene. A biofortified, resilient, and processing optimised tomato system could shift the nutritional landscape at population scale.
The vision of this programme is to create, validate, and deploy high β carotene tomato varieties and tomato products that can sustainably enhance dietary vitamin A intake across African communities, leveraging modern breeding technologies and capturing untapped natural variation. Validation and tangible benefits will be determined using a food systems science.
Our ambition is transformative:
• To reimagine tomatoes as a nutrition delivery platform, rather than merely a horticultural commodity.
• To combine frontier science with African-led breeding and food innovation.
• To establish a new model of biofortification that integrates metabolic design, environmental adaptation, and culinary acceptability from the outset.
This work will build the scientific foundations and applied pipeline necessary for a scalable provitamin A tomato solution, with impacts that extend into public health, gender equity, farmer income, and local agri processing economies.

Department of Biological Sciences

Dr Tina Steinbrecher

Rooted Futures: Rediscovering Forgotten Crops for Sustainable and Climate-Resilient Food Systems

What if some of the crops we need for a more sustainable future are already hiding in our past?
Modern agriculture relies on a surprisingly small number of plant species, despite centuries of people cultivating and consuming a far greater diversity of crops. Many once important edible plants have become overlooked or forgotten, even though they may possess traits that are highly relevant to contemporary challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, and the need for more resilient local food systems. This interdisciplinary PhD will investigate whether forgotten and underutilised crops can contribute to a more sustainable future.
The project offers considerable flexibility but may include identifying historically important crops in the British Isles and beyond, exploring why they disappeared from mainstream use, and assessing their potential value under modern environmental conditions. Depending on the student's interests, research could combine plant and seed biology, agronomy, environmental science, history, archaeology, ethnobotany, food studies, public engagement, or digital humanities approaches.
Potential research questions include: Which crops have been lost from modern food systems, and why? Do forgotten crops possess traits that could improve resilience to drought, heat, or poor soils? How have culture, trade, technology, and social change shaped what we eat? And how might rediscovering crop diversity support more sustainable and equitable food futures?
The project is particularly suited to students interested in working across disciplinary boundaries. Opportunities may include collaborations with heritage farming initiatives, museums, community food organisations, and researchers across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences.
Applications are welcome from candidates with backgrounds in biological sciences, environmental sciences, archaeology, history, food studies, anthropology, sustainability, or related disciplines. Enquiries from students with their own ideas related to forgotten crops are welcome.