Research Assistant - DISCA Project

About us

The Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry is world-renowned for its progressive research in the field of child and adolescent mental health.

Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry | School of Academic Psychiatry | King’s College London (kcl.ac.uk) 

In 2025, the Department will be moving to the newly built Pears Maudsley Centre for Children and Young People (PMC). The PMC has been developed by the King’s Maudsley Partnership for Children and Young People – a partnership between King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and Maudsley Charity. The Centre’s aim is to reduce the rate and impact of child mental health through world-leading research and its speedy translation into clinical care. This will be achieved through the co-location of clinical and academic teams to ensure that clinically relevant research is translated into novel preventions and treatments to benefit young people.

The PMC is the only facility in Europe with a primary focus on the mental health of young people and will have a state-of-the-art clinical research facility with cutting-edge equipment and be the perfect environment for translational research for young people. 

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/pears-maudsley-centre

https://slam.nhs.uk/pearsmaudsleycentre 

About the role

This is an exciting opportunity for a research assistant to work on a multicentre project funded by the NIHR that examines the effects of digital sleep therapy in children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. The RA will be based in KCL, London and work closely with Prof Rubia but be part of a multi-centre team led by Prof Catherine Hill and Prof Samuele Cortese and others across London and Southampton (The DISCA project).

Home | Disca Study (discasleep.org.uk)

Katya Rubia - King's College London (kcl.ac.uk) 

The aim of the project is to test whether a newly developed digital parent-guided behavioural intervention for chronic insomnia in children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (70% of people with ADHD have sleep problems) is significantly more cost-effective than treatment-as-usual (TAU) to improve sleep and other relevant outcomes (e.g., child behaviour and parental well-being, neuropsychological functioning and other measures).

The post-holder will be responsible for the neuropsychological assessments before and after the treatment.

The RA will have the opportunity to extend his/her experience in neurocognitive testing as well as analysing data & write papers. The candidate will work on the development of an exciting new digital sleep therapy for ADHD with a multidisciplinary team of sleep experts, cognitive neuroscientists, child psychiatrists and statisticians. 

This post will be offered on a full-time, fixed-term contract until 31st March 2026.

About you

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria 

• BA or BSc in psychology, neuroscience, medicine, computing/IT/maths, neurobiology, or related subjects
• Experience with data collection & storage
• Experience with neuropsychological testing
• Excellent communication skills, oral and written and excellent interpersonal skills and able to establish & maintain good channels of communication with participants and the research team 
• Good presentation skills
• Ability to work independently as well as part of a team and under supervision, assessing priorities & managing workload effectively 
• Prior experience in a related field
• Excellent organization skills, ability to prioritise work and meeting deadlines, and being flexible, committed, motivated, enthusiastic, proactive & reliable 

Desirable criteria

• Experience of working with children
• Experience of working with children with mental health disorders
• Experience of working with ADHD or other difficult pediatric groups 
• Experience of working in a RCT

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