Join the Lab

Are you interested in starting a PhD in our team in October 2025? You will need to apply to the PhD programme at the MRC CBU, and you can find more information about the process here.  

Please get in touch with Amy over email in the summer or autumn of 2024 to express your interest in applying. Please include in your first email: a) your CV and b) a max. 1 page PDF overview of what you are interested in studying for your PhD. Amy will then get in touch with you to discuss next steps. 

Note: At the CBU you can either apply for a PhD with a sole supervisor, or with another CBU PI joining as your co-supervisor in a close-knit supervisory team. You can also suggest co-supervisors from other departments at the University of Cambridge (e.g., Department of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry).

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://arxiv.org/abs/2011.09851

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.