Funded PhD Place - Using Wearables to Evaluate Early Story-telling Interventions

One funded PhD position is available to work on a project funded by the Mercers’ Company as a collaboration between the UEL BabyDevLab, the Discover Children’s Story Centre and the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF). 

The project will use child wearables and machine learning to assess the effect of a one-year story-telling intervention conducted in nurseries located in areas of socioeconomic deprivation. Our main analyses will focus on using classifiers to measure how the story-telling intervention affects the complexity and sequencing of children’s spontaneous speech and play, and intra-group coordination dynamics. 

The PhD will be based at the UEL BabyDevLab, under the supervision of Prof Sam Wass, working within a team of twenty full-time researchers working on similar projects funded by the ERC, MRC and ESRC, and will collaborate closely with storytellers based at the Discover Centre, and early years pedagogy experts based at LEYF. 

Experience of working with children and advanced data analyses (e.g. coding in Python/Matlab) is highly desirable. Please kindly note that only UK and naturalised EU students will be eligible for this position.

The PhD will start in November 2024 or January 2025. 

For more information and details of how to apply, please contact Sam Wass s.v.wass@uel.ac.uk.