Medical Sciences Division Graduate School Studentship Competition 

The Department of Experimental Psychology can nominate suitable applicants for the Medical Sciences Graduate School Studentship Competition. 

Prospective students do not apply directly for the Medical Science Division Graduate School studentships; they are nominated by the department based on an evaluation during the graduate admissions process.

Applicants will be notified of any nominations for this funding when they receive an initial conditional offer.

ESRC FUNDING COMPETITION 

We are able to nominate eligible applicants for funding via the Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership. Applicants will need to have fulfilled the majority of core training requirements as set down by the ESRC – see the ESRC postgraduate training and development guidelines for further information.

In order to be considered for an ESRC studentship you will need to complete the scholarships section of the University's graduate application form and submit additional supporting material. The required form can be accessed via the DTP Studentships page.  

The ESRC award funding packages depend on eligibility criteria that are explained on the Grand Union DTP website FAQ page.

We will notify you if you have been nominated for ESRC funding and formal notification, if your nomination is successful, will come from the Grand Union DTP at a later date. 

All About Me: oxford centre for emerging minds research Studentships

2 DPhil (PhD) studentships (from October 2026)

The Oxford Centre for Emerging Minds Research is a newly funded research centre that aims to conduct world class research that contributes to a world where differences between people are understood and accepted, strengths are capitalised on, and mental health difficulties are prevented or addressed early. The Centre bridges research across the Departments of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry, and it is physically located in our new state-of-the-art Life and Mind Building. The Centre will serve as a hub to investigate how to promote good mental health and prevent and treat emerging mental health conditions by identifying and harnessing children and young people’s aptitudes and interests and targeting the key mechanisms that underpin mental health in children and young people. The Paul Foundation’s generous gift will fund key areas of research, as well as the training and development of future leaders in the field.

We are now advertising two fully funded DPhil (PhD) studentships embedded in the Centre and in the research project entitled “All About Me”.  This research project focuses on neurodivergent children and young people, their families, and educators, to develop a neurodiversity-affirming toolkit to explore children’s character strengths, abilities, and potential across contexts. Embedding Artificial Intelligence and assistive technology, we aim to be at the forefront of understanding children and young people, and equipping key stakeholders to identify, explore, and scaffold opportunities for strengths-based approaches that allow neurodivergent children and young people to achieve goals that are most meaningful to them.

The two studentships will fund and support original research that addresses wellbeing and learning at key transitions across children’s development.

Each studentship will provide students with a stipend and fees at the Home UK rate, for three years.

Students will join an interdisciplinary team of research, clinical and educational experts:

-          Dr Jiedi Lei: Interests and expertise: autism (focus include strengths-based approaches, masking/camouflaging, autistic identity, reducing stigma and enhancing wellbeing in autistic youths), clinical psychology, children and young people, adapting mental health interventions to support autistic youths. Methods: clinical assessments, qualitative and quantitative research, co-production. Email: jiedi.lei@psych.ox.ac.uk

-          Dr Alexandra Hendry: Interests and expertise: early development of executive functions and self-regulation, autism and ADHD, how socio-economic factors shape risk and resilience. Methods: cognitive and clinical assessments; observations of behaviour in structured and unstructured contexts in the lab, home or early years setting; parent report; eyetracking; neurophysiological methods. Email: Alexandra.hendry@psy.ox.ac.uk 

-          Prof Kate Nation: Interests and expertise: language, literacy, learning and communication. Methods: psycholinguistic experiments, longitudinal studies, corpus and computational approaches. Email: Kate.nation@psy.ox.ac.uk

-          Prof Gaia Scerif: Interests and expertise: differences in attention and executive functions, their contribution to learning and wellbeing in the early years classroom. Methods: cognitive assessments, classroom observations, neuroscience methods. Email: Gaia.scerif@psy.ox.ac.uk

 All About Me – DPhil Studentship 1 – From the Early Years to Primary School

You will contribute to, and increasingly lead, work at the transition from preschool to primary school. Potential research questions will build on our team’s expertise in early cognitive development across domains (attention, executive function, language), as well as socio-emotional development and wellbeing, and the role of curiosity and motivation in learning. In the context of the early years, this project will rely on engaging parents and educators at all steps of the research process. We will also work on creative methods to include children’s voices in this process, drawing on community-based participatory design and co-production methods. For questions and to develop research proposal ideas, please contact Dr Alexandra Hendry and Prof Gaia Scerif.

 All About Me – DPhil Studentship 2 – Transition into and through Adolescence

You will contribute to, and increasingly lead, work at the transition into and through adolescence from childhood. Potential research questions will build on our team’s expertise in socio-emotional well-being and flourishing in neurodivergent youths, individualised goal setting to promote authenticity and autonomy during adolescence, drawing on strengths-based approaches (e.g., Character Strengths Framework from Positive Psychology) alongside interconnections with language, communication and learning. We will also work in partnership with neurodivergent young people and other stakeholder groups (e.g., parents/carers, educators, mental health professionals) to co-produce research and outputs, drawing on community-based participatory design and co-production methods. For questions and to develop research proposal ideas, please contact Dr Jiedi Lei and Prof Kate Nation.

 Application Process

The application process for these Oxford Centre in Emerging Minds scholarships will consist of two phases.

 For the first phase, you will need to:

 -          Have achieved or be on course to achieve a minimum 2:1 in undergraduate degree in Psychology or a related field

-          Name three referees who could write about your research and other relevant expertise

-          Submit a CV, personal statement (500 words) and a document explaining why you would want to join this project and specifying your research interests (500 words) to graduate.admissions@psy.ox.ac.uk  using ref number AAM25 in the subject of your e-mail

 Application Deadline: Wednesday 22nd October 2025

Interview: w/c Monday 3rd November 2025

 For the second phase, candidates who are successful at the first stage will be guided through the process of applying for admission by the Departments of Experimental Psychology or Psychiatry.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/dphil-experimental-psychology

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/dphil-psychiatry

For both phases, candidates will be most competitive if they already have either Masters level training and / or research assistance experience and / or experience with neurodivergent children and young people.

Icase studentship: Development of robust, single-subject markers of predictive inference for computational psychiatry

Lead supervisor: Professor Laurence Hunt

Co-supervisor: Professor Miriam Klein-Flügge

Commercial partner: P1vital

Several psychiatric and neurological disorders have been characterised in terms of alterations in decision making and predictive inference. There is widespread interest in understanding the neurophysiological basis of predictive inference – how the brain uses recent outcomes to make predictions about the probability of future events – which has been implicated in clinical conditions such as autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia.

However, a significant concern in studying clinically relevant individual differences within computational psychiatry has been the poor psychometric and neurometric properties of many commonly used tasks in the field. Identifying neural correlates that can be measured reliably in individual patients, within clinically feasible timescales, would be a key step toward biomarker development.

We have recently developed a continuous version of a widely used predictive inference task that is designed to enhance sensitivity to individual-level neural signals, enabling reliable estimation of belief-updating potentials from relatively brief neurophysiological (MEG/EEG) recordings. We have used test–retest analyses of neurophysiological data from participants performing this task in multiple sessions to demonstrate high reliability of individual ERP components associated with belief updating, using just 6-12 minutes of data per participant (Weber et al, in prep).

Building on this foundation, our proposed DPhil project has three aims:

(i) Analysis of recently collected data from a pharmacological study in patients with first episode psychosis. Patients have completed our task while randomised to either a standard treatment with a D2 receptor treatment for psychosis, or an adjunct treatment of D2 antipsychotic plus the NMDA receptor agonist memantine. The student will learn to analyse these data and apply these to this dataset, to study whether treatment with memantine affects neurophysiological signatures of predictive inference, in line with predictions from computational models of decision making (e.g. Cavanagh et al, eLife 2020);

(ii) Establish further neurophysiological indices of continuous tasks in other areas relevant to computational psychiatry (e.g. Facial Emotional Recognition Task (FERT) and/or Information Gathering Task), and establish test-retest reliability of these novel paradigms;

(iii) Collect comparative dataset on continuous tasks using the newly-installed, state-of-the-art optically pumped magnetometer (OPM)-MEG installation at the Warneford Hospital, to facilitate source-localisation of signals with high SNR, and evaluate OPM-MEG as a clinical tool.

A key element of the project will be the close involvement of our industry partners, P1vital, who will contribute throughout the project by advising on the clinical and commercial relevance of task design, digital biomarker validation, and patient-centred usability. In addition to this, the student will complete a 12-week placement at the company where they will lead an analysis project on data collected by P1vital, complementing their ongoing research projects in the rest of their DPhil.

Before applying for this position it is essential to contact the lead supervisors for informal discussions.

To make a formal application, please complete the University’s online application form for the DPhil in Experimental Psychology course. Please indicate the iCASE project clearly by inserting ‘iCASE’ before the project title and by using the reference code iCASE. You will need to provide a personal statement (500 words max). Note that no project proposal is required for the iCASE studentship applications.

If you wish to apply for a combination of iCASE and the regular DPhil in Experimental Psychology this can be done on the same application form.  In this circumstance, please ensure you include a full research proposal (maximum of 1,250 words) for the non-iCASE project.