Pre-defined projects
Below you can find a list of pre-defined research projects available for 2025. Please note that projects may be added after the application opening date. Please further note that you need to discuss how you would approach these projects with the respective project sponsor and they will also need to complete the Laidlaw Supervisor reference form to indicate that they support your application.
Note: If you are unable to view the pre-defined project descriptions listed below, you can see the project descriptions here (this is a temporary workaround as we update our website).
Pre-defined projects offered by St Andrews based academics
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Dr Richard Streeter, Geography & Sustainable Development
[email protected]Volcanic ash from Iceland reaches the UK with surprising frequency, and when it does so it has profound impacts on aviation – most recently this occurred in 2010 and 2011 with the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull and Grímsvötn. Icelandic ash from ancient eruptions is widely found in the UK – but we do not have a clear understanding of why particular eruptions are preserved in the long-term sedimentary record, yet others appear to be lost. To resolve this, and other taphonomic issues around volcanic ash preservation, a new approach is required. The aim of this project is to find and measure the abundance of ash shards from the most recent eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull and Grímsvötn in lake and peat sediments which were collected from sites in Shetland in October 2021. The scholar will examine these sediments microscopically, identifying ash shards and measuring their size and morphology. This information can then be combined with information collected during the eruptions (e.g., satellite records, information about ash collected in water gauges and weather conditions during the ash fall) to improve our understanding of the processes of preservation of volcanic ash. There will be the opportunity to collect further sediment samples from mainland Scotland.
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Prof Ian Smith, Business/Management
[email protected]The project will investigate the impact of UK university research in Economics. It will do this using as a data source the impact case studies submitted by economists at British universities to the Research Excellence Framework in 2014 and 2021 – see https://results2021.ref.ac.uk/impact. The aim is to classify the channels of impact, their importance, attributes and domains. The project will also study the distribution of impacts across different markets, institutions and sectors (banking and finance, employment, immigration, tax and benefits, economic growth, environment, competition etc.) to determine where economists think their research makes a difference. This project will be of particular interest to students who wish to pursue a career as economists or economic advisers, either in private consulting, think tanks, government, journalism, regulatory agencies or national/international institutions.
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Dr Vicky Ward, Business/Management
[email protected]Research conducted by business and management scholars has the potential to bring many tangible benefits to organisations and society, with topics ranging from philanthropy to workplace surveillance. But research can be used in many different ways by different groups of people meaning that understanding and demonstrating what these benefits are can be difficult. During this project you will explore 3-4 portfolios of business and management research and how these have been used by people working in policy and practice. It will involve liaising closely with business and management scholars in the University of St Andrews Business School, policymakers and practitioners. You will be supervised by Dr Vicky Ward who leads the RURU Network at the University of St Andrews (www.ruru.ac.uk) and is the Director of Impact for the Business School. You will be involved in designing the research as well as collecting and analysing data. This will involve interviewing researchers as well as policymakers and practitioners so will require excellent communication skills. As well as increasing your own knowledge of how research is used, you will be making a valuable contribution to business and management scholars’ ability to understand and articulate the benefits of their research to society.
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Prof Frank Sullivan and Dr Margaret McCartney, Medicine
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Dr Hana Jurikova, Earth & Environmental Sciences
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Dr James Rae, Earth & Environmental Sciences
[email protected]During the last 500 million years of the Phanerozoic Eon, Earth witnessed transitions between greenhouse and ice house climate states, along with a number of fundamental events, such as mass extinctions and ocean anoxic events. CO2 has been suggested to play an important role in many of these changes in the Earth system, but despite recent progress, past changes in CO2 levels remain poorly constrained. In this project, you will have the opportunity to look into Earth’s past CO2, climate and ocean chemistry using novel geochemical techniques. The project is designed to be flexible, with options to explore different fossil, sedimentary and evaporitic archives, trace element and isotopic approaches and time intervals.
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Dr Carolin Kosiol, Biology
[email protected]Evolutionary biologists have long been interested in the question how populations adapt to changing environments. In experimental evolution studies replicate populations are allowed to adapt to novel but controlled laboratory environments. The time-scale of laboratory experimental evolution is short; however, in the face of recent rapid anthropogenic changes to the climate and the environment, evolution over these short time-scales are now of urgent interest. Traditionally, experimental evolution has focussed on the dynamics of adaptation by studying the phenotypic changes in populations, rather than the underlying genetic changes that were not easily accessible.
Recent advances in sequencing technologies have provided a new experimental approach: evolve and re-sequencing (ER). ER experiments enable phenotypic divergence to be forced in response to changes in only few environmental conditions in the laboratory while other conditions are kept constant. The evolved populations are subjected to whole genome re-sequencing.
In this project we will explore new methods to analysed data from ER experiments. We have data sets for adaptation to new temperature regimes, and food resources and sexual mating systems in insects from experimental colleagues. However, we are also open to new ideas from Laidlaw research project students.
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We have recently developed a new approach to modelling quantum systems coupled to realistic environments, which can have memory of previous states of the system, and can thus describe “non-Markovian” dynamics. Applications include understanding the properties of different types of qubits for quantum computation, or questions associated with light interacting with organic or biological systems. The key idea in our approach is to make use of the idea of “matrix product states”, as a way to efficiently represent the effect of the environment. Mathematically, we use matrix product states to represent an object called the Process Tensor, which describes all effects of the environment.
The methods are made available in an open-source library https://oqupy.readthedocs.io/ (See papers linked there for examples of applications).
The goal of this project will be to explore new ideas we have had that may allow extensions to new classes of system. A particular idea we want to explore is methods to combine the Process Tensors from two environments to produce a single Process Tensor describing their joint effect. If successful, this has the potential to be very powerful, as repeated application of this would allow us to describe N copies of an environment with log(N) effort. Since the existing code base is written in Python, experience programming in Python would be desirable. In addition to the specific project described above, we would potentially be willing to supervise other projects extending or making use of the methods described above.
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Dr Frances Nethercott, Modern History
[email protected]Anglo-Russian relations during the nineteenth century were dominated by war and the threat of war. Russophobia was one obvious consequence of this as the press and politicians traded in negative stereotypes about the Russian menace as a military power and its cultural backwardness. This was nothing new, of course; analyses of travel accounts dating as far back as the sixteenth century evidence a long history of prejudice against the tyranny of Russian rulers and the barbarian practices of their people. The Victorians merely perpetuated these tropes. For the historian, they serve as a valuable index of ethnocentrism.
The period did, however, produce a body of knowledge about Russian history and popular traditions, songs, and folklore. Translated literature about Russia (mainly French and German), likewise, constituted the timid beginnings of a scholarly practice/tradition, while a small number of contemporary novelists – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov – enjoyed enthusiastic reception among creative writers and critics. Albeit later than countries on the European Continent, Chairs of Slavonic Studies were established at Oxford and Cambridge (1870s and 1880s) followed by others after 1900. Of note, here, is the fact that during the next few decades, advances in the subject area were largely due to the expertise of Russian emigres.This project, then, offers several lines of enquiry: the establishment of a ‘Russian corpus’; Victorian learning practices; the role of Russian emigres as conduits of knowledge and/or ‘opinion makers.’ I hope it will be of interest to students of History, English and /or Russian.
*(The proposal has some potential for research leadership experience: organization of a workshop with invited speakers specializing in any of the themes mentioned; interdisciplinary initiatives.)
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This project examines the digital activity of museum and heritage institutions in relation to the climate crisis. Digital technologies are often purported as one of the solutions to the climate crisis, however intersectional analysis reveals issues such as techno- and digital colonialism, a persistent digital divide and unsustainable extractive practices that disproportionately negatively affect the Minority World. Through guided research, analysing existing survey data, and conducting interviews with museum and heritage professionals globally, the successful student will analyse current understandings of the environmental cost of digital activity in the museums and heritage sector and set out recommendations for future activity.
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Dr Ruth Ezra, Art History
[email protected]Leaves of Glass: Mica Between Art and Science in Early Modernity comprises a cultural biography of Muscovy glass from its extraction in Siberia and movement in Anglo-Russian trade to its use as an ersatz window in objects as diverse as sundials, hand-held fans, raised-work cabinets, portrait overlays, butterfly boxes and a perspective treatise. The project considers how, as a foliaceous mineral, mica lent itself to modeling across disciplines, extending the aesthetic and scientific imaginations of painters, poets and natural philosophers alike. Case studies also highlight the material ingenuity of female embroiderers, émigré miniaturists, instrument makers and jobbing printers, figures heretofore kept at the margins of traditional histories of European baroque art.
The project will appeal to students interested in the histories of art and science as well as pre-industrial economies of extraction and trade between Europe and its contact zones.
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Dr Bernhard Struck, History
[email protected]In the early 1900s, the constructed language Esperanto spread rapidly across Europe and part of the globe around 1900. It was picked up in capitals but also in more peripheral places from the east coast of Scotland to Bulgaria or rural Finland. The new language attracted scientists, merchants, doctors, and indeed many women. Esperanto clubs, societies and journals mushroomed across and beyond Europe after 1900. The first international congress was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer (France) in 1905 and (with brief interruptions during both World Wars) congresses are still held today. Before 1914 numbers of Esperanto-speakers are estimated at around half a million before the language movement reached a quantitative peak in the 1920s. The language is active and alive in particular among a younger generation the flocks to new social forms of interaction and social media.
One of the many fascinating aspects of Esperanto and the language movement is the staggering variety of sources and objects it has produced. These range from letters, postcards, journals, annual year books, congress books, travel guides, photographs, posters, to literature, pins or t-shirts. How can we tell a history of Esperanto past and present through selected material objects? This is the guiding question that this Laidlaw Project proposes to ask.
This project will zoom into a select sample of sources and objects in order to tell the history of Esperanto – yet not along a more established timeline from then to now. But from different places, different moments in time, and through this fascinating and often scattered sources and material objects. The project will be based around the research project on “Esperanto and Internationalism, ca.1880s-1930” based at the Institute for Transnational and Spatial History. (see: https://www.transnationalhistory.net/esperanto/en/705ea-home/) and its wider outreach and impact activities.
With a focus on primary sources in various shape and form, it is the goal to identify objects and produce brief scripts and a sequence of shorter videos that explain these objects to a wider audience. The scholar will have access to resources of the group, will get an insight into collaborative research including outreach and producing media content. The scholar will be working along the lines of transnational and global history, a major and booming field over the past years. Ideally, this would be a project over the course of two years (AY2024/25).
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Dr Janet Lovett, Physics and Astronomy
[email protected]By utilising unpaired electron spins, i.e. radicals, we can precisely measure the very small: on the nanometre scale. This is very useful for understanding biological structures such as proteins and testing models of them, such as those generated by alphafold2. Working with Dr. Janet Eleanor Lovett (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~jel20), this project could focus on method development (in silico or at the bench), biological investigation, or possibly creating teaching resources or outreach activities (exact project aims are malleable, depending on applicant background and interest). This project will provide Scholars with an opportunity to develop wide-reaching skills development opportunities across the sciences (biology, chemistry, computer science, physics, and beyond).
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Dr V Anne Smith, Biology
[email protected]Bayesian networks (BNs) are flexible machine learning/artificial intelligence modelling tools that have been applied to a variety of biological systems and show promise for revealing network connectivity from neuroscience data. We have previously applied BN algorithms to recover networks of neural information flow from multi-electrode arrays, spiking neurons, and neural imaging data. This project will assess BNs’ ability to discover networks supporting flexible cortical analysis of speech from low density EEG measurements.
You will work in Dr V Anne Smith’s lab at St Andrews University, an interdisciplinary environment including group members applying and advancing BN use in neuroscience, ecology, genetics, and sociobiology. You will analyse data collected at Abderdeen University in Dr Anastasia Klimovich-Gray’s lab, from individuals listening to audio recordings and assigned a variety of cognitive attention tasks. You will assess BNs ability to recover networks representing underlying cognitive modules. You will address questions such as: Can networks connect features of audio recordings to specific cortical connectivity patterns? Does individual’s linguistic background (e.g., the languages they speak) influence network structure? How does cognitive attention modify neural information flow? Can network modules be identified that map onto specific cognitive tasks?
Answering these questions will lay the ground for future highly innovative uses of BNs with EEG data, and reveal insights into fundamental properties of cognition. This project is suited to students with an interest in any of: machine learning, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognition.
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Dr Rita Tojeiro, Physics and Astronomy
[email protected]The cosmic web is the familiar large-scale pattern of cosmological structure, typically characterised in terms of “filaments”, “voids”, “sheets” and “nodes”. It is a prediction from cosmological structure formation and key to our understanding of the Universe. The cosmic web is dominated by dark matter, but we are only able to directly observe galaxies, as shining beads that hang in this cosmic frame.
The cosmic web is predicted from theory to have a strong influence on the formation and properties of dark matter halos, and we have strong observational evidence that it also affects the properties of galaxies themselves. What we don’t yet understand is the physical path to this impact – are galaxies influenced by the cosmic web only indirectly, via its impact on the dark matter halos that host them, or are there additional physical processes at play?
The Laidlaw Scholar will investigate this question using the CAMELS suite of cosmological simulations: a public suite of thousands of small hydrodynamical simulations run with different cosmological parameters and different astrophysical models of feedback and star formation. The scholar will use the CAMELS simulations to explore the impact of cosmic filaments on galaxies and how that would change in universes with different models of physical feedback and background cosmology, with the goal of disentangling the effect of the two.
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Prof Sonja Vernes, Biology
[email protected]Vocal learning, the ability to produce modified vocalizations as a result of learning from acoustic signals, is a key trait in the evolution of speech. While extensively studied in songbirds, mammalian models for vocal learning are rare. Bats present a promising study system given their gregarious natures, small size, and maintenance in captive colonies. This project utilises a captive colony of Pale Spear-nosed Bats (Phyllostomus discolor) to understand vocal learning mechanisms in the brain. Using gene expression patterns to define brain regions within species and for comparative exploration of brain properties across species is an approach that is widely used in other systems such as humans, mice, and birds. This project will use histological approaches to explore gross structures and expression patterns of selected genes related to vocal learning brain regions and phenotypes in the P. discolor brain. For this, the student will apply techniques routinely used in this research group, such as Nissl staining and immunohistochemical detection to study the gene expression patterns in the P. discolor brain (see Vernes et al., 2022, Rodenas-Cuadrado et al, 2018).
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Prof Gillian Brown, Psychology and Neuroscience
[email protected]When selecting a romantic partner, women are reported to place greater emphasis than men on the potential ability of that partner to provide resources, which might be estimated by their financial status or education level. Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that this gender difference in partner preference relates to long-established gender differences in mating strategies, whereby women are interested in the ability of a partner to provide for their offspring. However, other researchers have suggested that the emphasis that women place on the resources of potential partners can be explained by societal gender differences in financial independence. This biosocial approach predicts that, in situations where women have greater financial independence (e.g., in countries with higher gender equality), women would place less emphasis on the resources of partners compared to situations where they have lower financial independence. The biosocial framework still acknowledges the biological differences between women and men, alongside the greater impact of bearing children on women’s than men’s career prospects. The aim of the research project is to examine the link between partner preferences and women’s financial independence within a UK-based sample of heterosexual female participants using online questionnaires. The student will collect data on women’s self-reported partner preferences, socioeconomic background, current financial status and gender role attitudes, and analyse the relationships between these variables. The project will provide a clearer understanding of the factors that influence women’s partner preferences, while critiquing simplistic evolutionary accounts of partner preferences that risk embedding gender inequalities and reducing individual choice.
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Dr Bettina Bildhauer, Modern Languages
[email protected]This project works towards identifying and translating manuscripts and print copies of the story matter The Seven Sages of Rome/The Book of Sindibad. It entails translating academic publications or premodern texts in any language that the candidate reads into English, and/or entering that information directly into our database. We are particularly interested in candidates who can translate from languages spoken outside Western Europe, specifically Arabic, Hebrew, East European, Scandinavian and Middle Eastern languages. The Seven Sages was one of the most popular texts across medieval and early modern Europe and Asia. It was translated into at least 30 languages under different titles, and many books have likely not yet been identified, so some detective work is required and some real new findings can be made here. The story is about non-consensual sex, which makes it both very relevant and potentially triggering. The successful student will contribute to the database that we are creating as part of the AHRC-funded project “The Seven Sages of Rome: editing and reappraising a forgotten premodern classic from global and gendered perspectives”: https://seven-sages-of-rome.org. You will gain real-life expertise in digital humanities and advanced research methods.
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Dr Jason McNulty, Chemistry
[email protected]An intersectional approach is vital to ensure that we are able to consider all aspects of an individuals background in learning and teaching methods. However, available data is often too limited in its scope to be of use to identify specific areas for improvement, e.g. in attainment gaps. This project proposes to take a data-driven approach to look at bespoke data within STEM subjects to identify areas for improvement with respect to the attainment gap and to highlight where best practice currently exists.
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Dr Nicôle Meehan, Museum and Heritage Studies
[email protected]This project examines the digital activity of museum and heritage institutions in relation to the climate crisis. Digital technologies are often purported as one of the solutions to the climate crisis, however intersectional analysis reveals issues such as techno- and digital colonialism, a persistent digital divide and unsustainable extractive practices that disproportionately negatively affect the Majority World. Through guided research, data analysis, and engagement with museum and heritage professionals globally, the successful student will assess current understandings of the environmental cost of digital activity in the museums and heritage sector and set out recommendations for future activity.
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