Interested in joining the group?

I am always looking for exceptional postdoc and PhD students to join the group, whether that is through existing grants or through the applicants' personal fellowships. I am happy to have informal conversations with candidates before they submit their final application.

If you are reaching out to discuss your interest in a postdoc / PhD opportunity, please include “APPLICATION” in your subject and the following in your email:

A succinct summary describing which aspects of the Future Leaders fellowship and a reference to one or more of our recent papers that you find most interesting and why.
A pdf of what you consider your best work so far; ideally, this will be a first authored paper (for postdocs).
Email addresses of two references who can write letters of recommendation for you.

I am keen to also support visits from early career researchers (e.g., PhDs/postdocs/‘baby-profs’ like myself): please do reach out if you are funded elsewhere, but would be interested in visiting with us for a period of time – whether that is in London or Oxford.

Group resources / environment

Spanning the Department of Informatics and the Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience (which itself is the largest research centre for mental health in Europe), we are well positioned to work at the intersection of HCI and mental health.

The Future Leaders fellowship has created an exceptional set of opportunities for everyone in the group. This is both in terms of:

the resources available for user studies (including funds for temp RAs to scale up studies), prototyping, travel, and training; and
perhaps even more importantly, the access to the network of collaborations and mentorships with world-leading groups (across Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, Northwestern, UW, Michigan …) that will help ensure our work has impact on the scientific community; and provide excellent networking and career growth opportunities for postdoc and PhD researchers.

One of the defining characteristics that I would like to cultivate within the group is the ability to span innovative research with substantial real-world applications.

For example, the Smart Toy research has—in just three years—moved from a simple idea on paper, to a funded fellowship, to research prototypes, to it now being taken up for production by a major US non-profit developer of social emotional learning (Commitee for Children), whose programs are used in more than 30% of US schools and across 70 countries world wide. At this point, more than 10k of the resulting ‘Purrble’ units have been produced, are available on Amazon, and is now starting to be piloted in NHS (and with three Randomised Controlled Trials ready for publications)

I expect this trend to continue across all our projects, especially as facilitating such pathways to impact is a key part of the Future Leaders fellowship funding and research agenda.

PhD scholarships

We are recruiting one PhD student for a fully funded scholarship. The focus on developing gen-AI powered parenting interventions. The student would be working with myself, our amazing postdoc (Aubrey Rhodes) and potentially also our colleagues at Oxford (Profs Binns and Lachman). Please reach out to me directly with a recent copy of your CV and sample publications (if you have any).

I am also keen to hear from exceptional international candidates considering submitting their own PhD fellowship applications to come work with me. If you have a suitable scheme in mind and an initial idea for what you would like to research (and how it connects to the bigger research vision of this group), please do reach out too!

Postdoc positions

While we have now recruited all of the post-doctoral researcher positions within the Future Leaders fellowship, I am always interested in supporting exceptional candidates in submitting their own fellowship applications to come work with me (and potentially other mentors across the FLF network). This is probably best suited for those in their final year of PhD, who are keen to embark on an academic career and already have an impressive track record.

I have been on fellowships since the start of my PhD (OEAW PhD fellowship, FWF Schroedinger for the post-doc, and FLF now) and am keen to support others to follow this path as well. In my experience, it provides an amazing opportunity for developing creative independence and research leadership early on, and can ease transition to tenure track faculty jobs.

For suitable candidates, I will be happy to help co-develop a fellowship application, both in terms of finding a mutually beneficial overlap in research interests, as well as in then writing it out into a good proposal.