PhD Studentship: Stress: The Good, The Bad, …

A little bit of stress in life is inevitable, and can actually be positive and promote wellbeing, for example by prompting you into action and helping you to meet your deadline. Research has shown that moderate, short-lived stress can improve alertness and performance, and boost memory, by strengthening connections between neurons in the brain. However, when stress is prolonged, severe, or chronic, it may leave you feeling overwhelmed, burned out, and unable to cope, and may have a harmful impact on your health and wellbeing.

How do we know when we have reached the point that the positive effects of stress are turning into negative consequences? How much stress, and for how long, can we endure before we reach this counterpoint? Answering these questions has the potential to impact on the development of interventions to improve outcomes in stress related mental illnesses and establish the conditions in which such an intervention would be effective.

The ambition for this project is to use the vast amount of knowledge and methodologies on assessing stress to investigate the mechanisms pointing towards and underlying this counterpoint. The project will draw on the supervisors’ expertise in stress research and methods including questionnaire and behavioural assessments, structural and functional neuroimaging, and biomarker assessment using blood, urine, saliva, and hair samples. The project will bring a unique biopsychosocial perspective to the causal inference of stress on mental health and wellbeing.

Supervision team: Dr Renate Reniers (University of Birmingham), Prof Zubair Ahmed (University of Birmingham), Dr Carla Toro (University of Warwick).

Funding notes:

This studentship is funded by the Midlands Mental Health and Neurosciences PhD Programme for Healthcare Professionals: https://midlandsmhndtp.ac.uk/. For more details on the project, please visit: https://midlandsmhndtp.ac.uk/project/2025-renate-reniers. Full details regarding the recruitment process for applicants, including the recruitment timeline, can be found here: https://midlandsmhndtp.ac.uk/applications/2025-recruitment.

References:

Dhabhar FS. Effects of stress on immune function: the good, the bad, and the beautiful. Immunol Res. 2014 May;58(2-3):193-210. doi: 10.1007/s12026-014-8517-0. PMID: 24798553.

Lu S, Wei F, Li G. The evolution of the concept of stress and the framework of the stress system. Cell Stress. 2021 Apr 26;5(6):76-85. doi: 10.15698/cst2021.06.250. PMID: 34124582; PMCID: PMC8166217.

Marin MF, Lord C, Andrews J, Juster RP, Sindi S, Arsenault-Lapierre G, Fiocco AJ, Lupien SJ. Chronic stress, cognitive functioning and mental health. Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2011 Nov;96(4):583-95. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2011.02.016. Epub 2011 Mar 2. PMID: 21376129.

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