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PhD Positions

The Digital Mental Health Group at the University of Cambridge is now opening our annual call for Expressions of Interest from prospective PhD students to start in October 2027.

We're looking for outstanding applicants with a strong academic background, relevant research experience, independence of thought and an exciting research proposal that aligns with our work on how digital environments impact outcomes such as mental health.

The group receives a high volume of expressions of interest. The PhD application process at Cambridge is exceptionally competitive. The Group only supports applicants who secure full PhD funding. We typically expect to support no more than two fully funded students per year.

To express your interest, please send us:

·       A one-page research proposal outlining your proposed PhD project

·       Your academic CV, including degree results and relevant research experience

Deadlines

·       US citizens applying for the Gates Cambridge Scholarship: submit your Expression of Interest by 12:00 (midday) on Friday 28 August 2026.

·       All other applicants: submit your Expression of Interest by 12:00 (midday) on Friday 25 September 2026.

 After initial review, longlisted candidates will be invited to discuss their proposal and application motivations with Professor Amy Orben and ask any questions they may have for her. Following these discussions, a small number of shortlisted applicants will be supported to develop their proposal into a full Cambridge PhD application.

Please submit your expression of interest to:

dmh-recruitment@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk

The Group runs a single annual PhD recruitment cycle, aligned with the University’s early December application deadline for an October start in the following year.

Application process

Submitting a PhD application with the Digital Mental Health Group involves several stages.

1.     Initial expression of interest

To express interest, please email our Centre Manager Tania Smith (dmh-recruitment@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk) with:

  • A one-page research proposal outlining what sort of research project you would like to do during your PhD. Please also note whether you classify as a UK home student.

  • A current academic CV, including your past university and school degree marks/classifications as well as any relevant research experience.

Expressions of interest will be reviewed by the group on the first weekday of October (for admission to a PhD in October the following year), except if you are a US citizen intending to apply for the Gates Scholarship for which we will review applications the first weekday of September. Applications must be received by 12:00 (midday) on the Friday preceding the relevant review date.

Expressions of interest received after the first weekday of November will not normally be considered. Any exceptions require explicit approval from the Group Lead.  If we decide to progress your application further, we will contact you to arrange a 30min call with Professor Orben to discuss your past research experience and research proposal, with some time for you to ask any questions you may have.

Throughout this process, your application will be assessed based on:

-        Alignment with current and planned research priorities

-        Scientific quality and feasibility of the proposed project

-        Strength of academic record and research experience

-        Availability of space and resources

 

2.     Application drafting
A maximum of six applicants will normally be invited to develop a full PhD application with the Group. You will be given a deadline to send your draft to Professor Orben who will give written feedback and may offer an additional call to discuss any further details.

3. Submitting your application to the department:

You will be expected to submit your application via the standard university and department procedures. At that point you will join the standard departmental admissions process, which you can find on the departmental website.

In the Digital Mental Health group, we are interested in how adolescent mental health outcomes are impacted by social media use in many different ways. There are therefore various potential avenues for a PhD in this space, and we would love to hear your own original ideas. To gain inspiration, you can find a non-exhaustive list of some example research areas we are interested in below:

1)  Studying real-world behaviour: How can we study time-critical questions about social media’s impact on mental health using real-world behavioural data? We have access to a range of social media data linked to long- and short-term questionnaires. This includes Twitter data linked to a longitudinal cohort, and Instagram and TikTok Data Donation Packages (the latter including timestamps and links of videos watched) linked to short-term intensive longitudinal data concerning teen mood. We also expect to obtain additional access to similar datasets at larger scales and intend to scrape data ourselves in future. A PhD project could develop innovative methods to collect and/or analyse these data to answer previously unanswerable research questions.

Key references:

https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241229655

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qre85

2) Computational Approaches: How can we apply analytical or computational methods from across the cognitive sciences to our research questions of interest, e.g. why social media seems so addictive and encourages habitual behaviours? Using the same real-world behavioural data as described above, a PhD project might, for example, apply computational foraging models to social media behaviours, using data scraped from platforms or collected via data donation (see reference). Our team has recently discussed a range of relevant modelling approaches (Ferguson et al. 2024; Turner et al. 2024), and have a reinforcement learning model specific to social media behaviour in prep, that could be used and extended.

Key references:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.02.005

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/f5cjv

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19607-x

https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsaa037

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.49547

3)  Development: How do developmental processes in adolescence, and potentially childhood, intersect with social media use and mental health? A PhD project could focus on how certain pubertal or neural changes during this time impact how adolescents interact with and react to social media and other digital environments. This could include pre-existing data (e.g., ABCD) or novel data collection.

Key references:

https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00307-y

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29296-3

https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115202

https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00402-9

4) Experiments and Interventions: There is a general dearth of causal evidence in our research area so we are always interested in PhDs who are interested in using experiments or interventions to bridge this gap.

Key reference:

https://ulriklyngs.com/pdfs/2024_redd_chi.pdf

5) Adolescents and AI: We are also interested in innovative approaches to studying the current and future impact of AI use on young people, as we expect this to be a quickly developing area.