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Psychology PhD

Psychology is an established and vibrant research discipline at the University of Brighton.

Our research is at the forefront of developments in applied, critical, community, social and health psychology and emerging fields such as cyberpsychology and ecopsychology. It addresses a wide range of topics such as mental health and wellbeing, friendship, identity, poverty and social exclusion, security and surveillance, gender, sexuality, intimacy, migration, nature-based interventions and climate change.

We are renowned for a creative approach to methods and have specialist knowledge across both quantitative and qualitative approaches, incorporating the latest technology (including state of the art eye tracking and biopack equipment) via our lab resources. We often collaborate with both academic and non-academic partners and have strong links with various community groups and organizations. In addition, the University of Brighton fosters a range of research that integrates Psychology and related humanities and social science subjects, so is also well-placed to develop cross-disciplinary projects with subjects that make use of psychological practices and methodologies.  

Gaining a PhD in Psychology will enhance your career opportunities in academia and beyond. Opportunities include academic posts as lecturers and postdoctoral research assistants at the University of Brighton and elsewhere, as well as roles in central and local government, non-governmental organisations, social research, teaching, journalism and the media.

Recent and current PhD students have been successful in obtaining studentships covering both fees and living costs through the University of Brighton’s involvement in the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Programme. 

Apply to 'social Science' in the applicant portal

Apply with us for funding from the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Programme

Key information

As a Psychology PhD student at Brighton, you will benefit from: 

  • a supervisory team comprising two or sometimes three members of academic staff. Depending on your research specialism you may also have an additional supervisor from another School, another research institution, or an external partner from government or industry.  
  • desk space and access to a computer in a space specifically designed for research students. There are a range of facilities on the Falmer site include various catering options.
  • access to a range of electronic resources via the University’s Online Library, as well as to the physical book and journal collections housed within the Falmer Library and other campus libraries.  
  • access to state-of-the-art research facilities and support from the Psychology Laboratories in our Watson Building, Falmer
  • a range of social and research events and activities, including the Social Science Forum, a fortnightly opportunity for researchers to share their work and contribute to the development of each other’s research, an annual ‘Festival of Social Science’ for social scientists and their collaborators across the university, and an annual Social Science Public Lecture which is included in the Brighton Festival Fringe programme.

Academic environment

Our Psychology PhD students are based within the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton’s Falmer campus. They join a school with a significant breadth and depth of Psychology provision and a stimulating programme of study at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

The school provides a vibrant environment for doctoral study, with opportunities to work with leading researchers in psychology and related disciplines and to make use of our excellent research facilities. In recent years we have significantly invested in research facilities, equipped with research-grade eye tracking and psychophysiology monitoring equipment, wearable cameras, and dedicated creative methods and qualitative research labs.

The School of Humanities and Social Science at the University is an interdisciplinary school of academic and research staff. Researchers tend to work collaboratively across multiple research groups in addressing challenges of social, health, psychological, spatial, and environmental injustice, seeking to transform policy and practice on global and more local scales.

We have nurtured partnerships with a range of organisations, locally, nationally and internationally including Age UK, Brighton and Hove City Council, the Sussex Partnership Trust, National Trust, Mind UK, the Hope Foundation (India), and University’s including Sussex, Leeds and Guelph (Canada) 

Our research attracts funding from AHRC, ESRC, Wellcome Trust, NIHR, ERC Horizon 2020 and the Independent Social Research Foundation and others.

Within this department of the school we work primarily in these Research and Enterprise Groups:

Care, health and emotional wellbeing REG

Cities, injustice and resistance REG

Depending on the nature of your PhD project, you will also be invited to become a member of one of the university’s Centres of Research and Enterprise Excellence (CORES):

Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics

Centre for Digital Media Cultures 

Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics

Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender

Some of our supervisors

Profile photo for Dr Matthew Adams

Dr Matthew Adams

Dr Adams supervises PhD students addressing a range of topics including mental health and distress, social and cultural identity, critical psychologies of climate change, climate activism, nature-connection, Anthropocene studies, nature-based interventions, human-animal relations and posthumanities. He is especially interested in supervising students adopting qualitative methodological and critical theoretical approaches. Interdisciplinary projects are especially welcome. 

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Dr Emma Anderson

I welcome applications from postgraduate students interested in research projects that are rooted in the disciplines of critical social and community psychology. Particular areas of interest are: critical approaches to health and citizenship, critical discursive psychology, creative methodologies, the role of media in everyday life, and post-feminist sensibilities.

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Dr Josh Cameron

Josh Cameron is an experienced research supervisor at masters and doctoral level. He is interested to support research into the following research areas: mental health recovery; mental health and employment; meaningful work; occupational science/justice and social justice orientated resilience. His primary expertise lies in the use of qualitative methods within a (critical) realist methodology. Josh encourages his students to adopt collaborative and participatory approaches to their research projects. He is always happy for prospective doctoral and masters students to contact him via email j.cameron@brighton.ac.uk to have an exploratory discussion.

Profile photo for Dr Hannah Cassidy

Dr Hannah Cassidy

I would be very interested in supervising postgraduate students conducting projects on:

  • Child and adolescent discourses surrounding sex in different cultures/countries;
  • Development of telling secrets and lies (decision-making, social context, motivation);
  • Secrets as a social currency in social interaction;
  • Online deception (use of impression management strategies to explore online identity);
  • Challenges facing police who interview child and adolescent victims of abuse;
  • Perceptions of children with sexually harmful behaviour towards other children;
  • Children's understanding of truths/lie and how to promote honesty.
Profile photo for Dr Apurv Chauhan

Dr Apurv Chauhan

I welcome doctoral research ideas related to:

  • poverty, homelessness, deprivation, and social inequalities
  • social representations; risk and trust in social world and healthcare; perspectives on vaccines (including hesitancy and refusal); public understanding of science
  • Using big-data for psychological research

Interested students are encouraged to send a short email to me with their initial ideas.

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Dr Gemma Graham

I'm happy to supervise PhD students on a range of topics broadly relating to Forensic Psychology and Cyberpsychology. I am especially interested in supervising students adopting an Eye Tracking methodology. Current PhD projects I am supervising address the following:

  • Terror Management Theory approaches to climate change communication (Joe Rennie-Taylor)
Profile photo for Prof Angie Hart

Prof Angie Hart

Students drawn to studying with me are generally people with a commitment to social change. All of them share my passion for researching resilience-related topics and most of their studies involve some form of co-production with communities, policymakers or practitioners. Many of them also volunteer for our social enterprise Boingboing and there are loads of opportunities in our CRSJ for students to get involved in some fabulous personal development activities, for example attending conferences on behalf of our Centre, being on the Management Group, staffing a stand at international events, etc.

Prospective supervisory topics I get excited about include:Co-productive and resilience-based approaches to tackling social and environmental issues including:Child, family and adult mental healthPractitioner stress and burnoutSchools practicesHigher Education community-university partnership practices.

Profile photo for Dr Helen Johnson

Dr Helen Johnson

Helen supervises PhD and MD students with an interest in arts-based interventions in healthcare, education and wellbeing, and/or the use of creative, arts-based research methods.  She is interested in talking to doctoral applicants who are interested in researching creativity and the arts, with foci including: art therapy; arts interventions for health and wellbeing, including invisible chronic and contested conditions; social prescribing; creativity and the lived experience of dementia; arts education; spoken word and poetry slam; art worlds/communities; arts inclusivity; everyday creativity; and the artistic process.   She is also interested in supervising students who wish to work with creative, arts-based and/or participatory methods, including: poetic inquiry; autoethnography; photo voice; photo elicitation; collaborative poetics; and participatory action research.  Helen currently supervises four doctoral candidates, who are researching: the lived experiences of women with borderline personality disorder (including creative coping strategies); neurologic music therapy with young people with juvenille dementia; black people's experiences of intimacy and psychosis; and decolonial praxis in museum learning.  She has previously supervised and examined work covering topics that include: perceptions of frailty in the undergraduate medical curriculum; the impact of austerity policies on homeless people; spoken word with young offenders in a Macedonian prison; the performance and perception of authenticiy in contemporary UK spoken word poetry; and NHS staff experiences of work.

Profile photo for Dr Nichola Khan

Dr Nichola Khan

I am interested in supervising students in the interdisciplinary areas of migration, war, conflict, violence, refugees, transnationalism, ethnicity, mobilities, cities, migrant health and mental health, social inequalities, and environmental violence- particularly those working on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and migrant populations in Asia and Europe. My past and present students also work on very different kinds of topic, including around race and sexuality, autophenomenography and psychotherapy, childrens violence to parents, climate-induced migration as an emergent political and policy field, adolescent refugee mental health, female genital mutilation in Southern England, honour based violence and the British police, trans lives in Bolivia, refugee women and yoga in Sweden- and postdoctoral research on peacemaking in the Basque country.

Profile photo for Dr Charlie Lea

Dr Charlie Lea

I would be interested in supervising doctoral students in areas of Positive psychology, specifically how people think about life satisfaction; the cognitive processes underpinning life satisfaction and happiness; the importance of money to life satisfaction; improvisation and how it relates to wellbeing. More broadly, this encompasses: well being; life satisfaction; happiness; hedonic wellbeing; eudaimonic well being; flow. I would also consider some aspects of Social psychology, specifically the relationship between friendship and coping behaviours.

Profile photo for Dr Linda Tip

Dr Linda Tip

I supervise PhD students on a variety of topics that focus on the psychological side of migration. I welcome proposals from students who want to investigate how we can improve health and well-being of ethnic and religious minority groups. This includes research into existing inequalities. For example, some of my research focuses on digital inequalities among refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, and investigates how this links to their wellbeing. In another project, we explore the digital worlds of refugee and asylum seeking children, including the risks and benefits of using of digital technology in their education.

Profile photo for Dr Anna Zoli

Dr Anna Zoli

I am interested in supervising a number of topics rooted in the disciplines of Critical Social Psychology, Critical Community Psychology, and Discursive Psychology, with a transdisciplinary ethos. Broad areas are: non-normative sexualities, religious and ideological discourses, nature and sustainability. For example:

- Non-normative sexualities, LGBTI+ issues

- Sex work, sex workers, and intersectionalities

- Religious and ideological discourses on sexuality

- Transdisciplinary approaches to sexuality and gender

- Permaculture, Transition Towns, group dynamics, grass-root social movements

- Transdisciplinary approaches to environmental crisis, peak oil, and climate change

- Non-clinical approaches to mental health

- Values of space in shaping people’s social identities

- Critical Community Psychology

- Critical Social Psychology, and Discursive Psychology

For further supervisory staff including cross-disciplinary options, please visit research staff on our research website.

Making an application

You will apply to the University of Brighton through our online application portal. When you do, you will require a research proposal, references, a personal statement and a record of your education.

You will be asked whether you have discussed your research proposal and your suitability for doctoral study with a member of the University of Brighton staff. We recommend that all applications are made with the collaboration of at least one potential supervisor. Approaches to potential supervisors can be made directly through the details available online. If you are unsure, please do contact the Doctoral College for advice.

Please visit our How to apply for a PhD page for detailed information.

Sign in to our online application portal to begin.

Fees and funding

Funding

Undertaking research study will require university fees as well as support for your research activities and plans for subsistance during full or part-time study.

Funding sources include self-funding, funding by an employer or industrial partners; there are competitive funding opportunities available in most disciplines through, for example, our own university studentships or national (UK) research councils. International students may have options from either their home-based research funding organisations or may be eligible for some UK funds.

Learn more about the funding opportunities available to you.

Tuition fees academic year 2022–23

Standard fees are listed below, but may vary depending on subject area. Some subject areas may charge bench fees/consumables; this will be decided as part of any offer made. Fees for UK and international/EU students on full-time and part-time courses are likely to incur a small inflation rise each year of a research programme.

MPhil/PhD
 Full-timePart-time

UK

£4,596 

£2,298

International (including EU)

£15,282 

£7,641

International students registered in the School of Humanities and Social Science or in the School of Business and Law

£13,464 

£6,732


PhD by Publication
Full-time Part-time
 N/A  £2,298 (UK)

Contact Brighton Doctoral College

To contact the Doctoral College at the University of Brighton we request an email in the first instance. Please visit our contact the Brighton Doctoral College page.

For supervisory contact, please see individual profile pages.

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