Supervisors and topics

Looking for a supervisor? Learn more about our supervisors' areas of expertise and current availability.

Research thematic hubs

Research is carried out within our seven thematic hubs. These are:

Supervisors are affiliated with at least one thematic hub; some are affiliated with two or more hubs. You will find our supervisors grouped by hub below.

Available to supervise

Dr Fatih Aktas

Areas of research interest:

  • Comparative and International Education
  • Higher Education from a comparative and international perspective
  • Creativity, innovation, global citizenship in Higher Education
  • Education Financing
Dr Seongsook Choi

Areas of research interest:

  • Interaction (classroom interaction, professional interaction, interdisciplinary/intercultural interaction/communication)
  • Spoken, institutional, and professional discourse
  • Constructing identity
  • Interdisciplinary research engagements in Higher Education
Dr Alice Dias Lopes

Areas of research interest:

  • Higher education
  • Social stratification in education
  • Data and education
  • Quantitative methods
  • Education expansion in Latin America
Dr Adriana Duta

Areas of research interest:

  • Social stratification and social mobility
  • Social inequalities in education, the labour market and family demography
  • School attainment | Higher education | Graduates’ labour market outcomes 
  • Life course | Longitudinal analysis
  • Cross-national comparative research
  • Quantitative methods | Large-scale survey and administrative data
Dr Sarah Foley

Welcomes ideas on projects around:

  • parenting and families
  • fathers
  • family transitions (e.g., to parenthood, divorce/separation)
  • new family forms
  • mind-mindedness
  • attachment
  • theory of mind
  • child social, emotional and cognitive development
  • longitudinal methods
  • quantitative methods
Professor Cristina Iannelli

Areas of research interest:

  • Social stratification in education and the labour market
  • Social mobility
  • Youth transitions
  • Cross-country comparative analyses
  • Quantitative data analysis
Dr Kristina Lindemann

Areas of research interest:

  • Social and ethnic inequalities in education
  • School-to-work transitions
  • Parental separation and stepfamilies
  • Comparative analysis of educational contexts
  • Quantitative methods
Dr Nataša Pantić

Areas of research interest: 

  • Teacher agency
  • Educational change
  • Relationships in an education setting
  • Mixed-method social network analysis 
Professor John Ravenscroft

Areas of research interest:

  • Visual impairment
  • Adaptive sport
  • Sensory impairment
  • Hearing impairment
  • Inclusion
  • Philosophy of education/ Virtue epistemology
Professor Sheila Riddell

Areas of research interest:

  • Additional support needs
  • Higher education
  • Equality and social justice
Dr Daniel Shephard

I am interested in supervising the following topics and methodologies:

Topics:

  • Education and development
  • Refugee education 
  • Migrant education 
  • Education and conflict
  • Educational data

Methodologies:

  • Social network analysis 
  • Mixed methods
  • Longitudinal research   
  • Primary data collection (qualitative and quantitative)
Dr Tracy Stewart

Areas of research interest:

  • Child and adolescent mental health and wellbeing (including adolescents up to age 24)
  • Cognition, executive functioning and emotion regulation in depression and anxiety
  • Mental health in developmental disorders
Dr Csabo Szabo

Areas of research interest:

  • Emotion vocabulary testing and learning
  • Vocabulary knowledge, learning and testing in multilingual contexts
  • Language assessment
  • Academic achievement in HE
  • Cognate recognition, processing and production
Dr Patricio Troncoso

Interested in supervising PhD students on the following topics/areas:

  • Educational inequalities
  • Quantitative methods
  • Children and family's mental health and wellbeing
  • Child protection

Methodological expertise: Advanced Statistical Methods, including:

  • Multilevel Modelling
  • Longitudinal Analysis
  • Structural Equation Modelling
  • Latent Variable Modelling
Dr ML White

Interested in issues related to:

  • social justice
  • ethnographic educational research
  • visual research methods
  • multimodal perspectives on urban schooling

Specifically, I am interested in how we prepare beginner teachers to work in areas of socio-economic disadvantage, reaching and teaching students in poverty and the consequences of what Ladson-Billings (2006) calls the educational debt. In addition to my work in teacher education, I am interested in and have written about developing civic media pedagogies, social geography and how young people experience space and place in education and learning.

Not available to supervise

Dr Serdar Abaci

Areas of research interest:

  • Digital literacy for teachers
  • Data literacy in education
  • Online and blended learning
  • Technology-enabled assessment and feedback
  • Use of technology for teaching and learning
Dr Josie Booth

My research seeks to understand and support how children learn and the relationships with their health behaviour (e.g. physical activity and obesity). Much of my research involves school-based programmes which are often co-created with teachers and pupils and includes neurodiverse populations, such as ADHD. I use a range of methodology in my research, such as Randomised Controlled Trials, Secondary data analysis of longitudinal data sets, and systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Dr Fiona O'Hanlon

Areas of research interest:

  • Bilingual education
  • Languages education
  • Attitudes to language
  • Language policy
  • Language planning
Professor Judy Robertson

Interested in computer science education schools, particularly data literacy.

Dr William Smith

Areas of research interest:

  • Education and international development
  • Comparative education
  • Global governance and international organisations
  • Testing and accountability in education

Note that I focus on the primary and secondary level.


Available to supervise

Dr Kuang-Hsu Chiang

Areas of research interest:

  • Higher Education policies
  • Knowledge production
  • University-industry partnership, Doctoral education
  • Research training, Disciplinary differences, European and international higher education systems, Interculturality and knowledge, Research on research
  • Meta-analysis of research
  • Nature of enquiry
  • Research in different fields: Trust and Higher Education, University and industry, Research and Higher Education policies, Technocracy and administration, Research and teaching relationships, Comparative education studies
Dr Sarah Foley

Welcomes ideas on projects around:

  • parenting and families
  • fathers
  • family transitions (e.g., to parenthood, divorce/separation)
  • new family forms
  • mind-mindedness
  • attachment
  • theory of mind
  • child social, emotional and cognitive development
  • longitudinal methods
  • quantitative methods
Dr Samantha Friedman

Areas of research interest:

  • Autism (and neurodiversity more broadly)
  • Neurodivergent children's school experiences
  • Neurodivergent teachers
  • Nature-based learning
  • Connection to nature
  • Qualitative methods
Dr Lauren Hammond

Areas of research interest:

  • Children’s geographies
  • Geography education
  • Curriculum
  • Geographies of education and education spaces
  • Children’s rights
  • Participatory research methods
Dr Deborah Holt

Areas of research interest:

  • Positive mental health promotion in education 
  • Health and wellbeing
  • Wellbeing promotion
  • Pastoral care of pupils in schools and students in universities
  • Anything related to promoting the social, emotional and mental wellbeing of learners, e.g. resilience, emotional literacy, co-operative learning, resolving conflict
  • Metacognitive approaches in the classroom
Dr Jennifer Lavoie

Areas of research interest:

  • Children and the legal system
  • Child maltreatment and child protection
  • Commercial sexual exploitation of children
  • Child-friendly justice models
  • Forensic interviewing protocols
  • Forensic disclosure
  • Children
  •  Adolescents
  • Developmental trajectories
  • Lying
  • Secrecy
  • Theory of mind
  • Justice
  • Moral development
  • Cognitive development
  • Conduct problems
  • Parent socialisation and parenting
Professor Catherine (Mary) Maternowska

Areas of research interest:

  • Children and young people
  • Social justice and inclusion
  • Medical anthropology
  • Violence prevention
  • Child rights and protection
  • Sexual and reproductive health
  • Mixed methods research
  • Child sexual abuse and exploitation
Dr Lynn McNair

Areas of research interest:

  • Early childhood education
  • Friedrich Froebel
  • Transition
  • Pedagogy
  • Power
  • Philosophy of education
  • Scottish education
  • Play
Dr Fiona Morrison

I welcome PhD applications in the areas of children's rights and violence against children.

Dr Andie Reynolds

Areas of research interest:

  • Working with children and young people for social justice
  • Children and young people’s participation in policymaking
  • Youth work and mental health
  • Refugee education / Education in Emergencies

I am also very interested in working with doctoral students looking to use indigenous, decolonial, intersectional, feminist or post-structuralist methodologies and methods.

Dr Julie Smith

Areas of research interest:

  • Student learning in Higher Education
  • Psychology of mathematics teaching & learning
  • supporting mental health in education
Dr Tracy Stewart

Areas of research interest:

  • Child and adolescent mental health and wellbeing (including adolescents up to age 24)
  • Cognition, executive functioning and emotion regulation in depression and anxiety
  • Mental health in developmental disorders
Professor Kay Tisdall

Areas of research interest:

  • Children's human rights
  • Children's participation in decision-making
  • Children's and childhood policy
  • Disabilities issues affecting children
  • Education and schooling
  • Related socio-legal analysis
  • Methodologies of research and consultation with children and young people
Dr Martin Toye

Areas of research interest:

  • Inclusive education
  • Cognitive development
  • Executive functions and academic attainment
  • Specific learning difficulties
Dr Patricio Troncoso

Interested in supervising PhD students on the following topics/areas:

  • Educational inequalities
  • Quantitative methods
  • Children and family's mental health and wellbeing
  • Child protection

Methodological expertise: Advanced Statistical Methods, including:

  • Multilevel Modelling
  • Longitudinal Analysis
  • Structural Equation Modelling
  • Latent Variable Modelling
Dr Laura Wright

Areas of research interest:

  • Participatory methods (play and arts-based)
  • Child rights
  • Co-research/coproduction with children and young people
  • Child and youth activism
  • Outdoor play
  • Mental health and psychosocial wellbeing
  • Children and young people's mental health and wellbeing

 

Not available to supervise

Dr Marlies Kustatscher

Areas of research interest:

  • Children and young people’s social identities and inequalities of race, class, gender etc.
  • Children’s rights and participation in research, policy and practice
  • Children's emotions and relationships, particularly in educational settings
  • Intersectionality, feminist research, research with children, participatory action research
Dr Sarah McGeown

Areas of research interest:

  • Literacy/reading
  • Sex/gender differences
  • Mental toughness/resilience
  • Motivation
Dr Shari Sabeti

Areas of research interest:

  • Arts education (including literature, graphic novels and the visual arts)
  • Cultural heritage education
  • Museum education
  • Creative writing
  • Anthropology of education
  • Education in the global south
  • Education and development
  • Literacy in its social context
  • Projects focused around ethnography as the primary approach to research
  • Projects interested in using visual or arts-based methodologies
Dr Sarah Ward

Youth work and community development, including how to support  high-poverty communities to have a voice in policy decisions that concern them, and in journeys towards collective agency. Research projects have included building a capabilities framework for social change with young people in Scotland, and a multi-site evaluation of community development using theory-based evaluation (Theory of Change and Realistic Evaluation).


Available to supervise

Dr Huw Davies

Areas of research interest:

  • Critical/digital/media/information/data literacies
  • Structured digital inequalities
  • Political economy of edtech and AIEd
  • Politics of education
  • Culture wars and education
Dr Janja Komljenovic

Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of ‘the digital’ in higher education and themes related to:

  • Digitalisation, platformisation and datafication of universities
  • Political economy of education digitalisation
  • Policy and governance of technology and digital data in higher education, assetisation, and the social, economic, legal and cultural dimensions of digitalisation
  • Digital markets and digital economy in education, EdTech industry, EdTech actors
  • Privatisation and commercialisation of higher education
Dr Alice Dias Lopes

Areas of research interest:

  • Higher education
  • Social stratification in education
  • Data and education
  • Quantitative methods
  • Education expansion in Latin America
Dr Rory Ewins

Areas of research interest:

  • IT and its political, social, cultural and educational impact 
  • Intellectual property
  • Online identity
  • Digital education in developing countries
Dr James Lamb

Areas of research interest:

  • Learning spaces
  • Multimodality in education
  • Assessment practice and digital technology
  • Sonic methods in education research
Professor Andrew Manches

Areas of research interest:

  • Children (<12 years) and technology
  • Embodied cognition
  • Early numerical development
  • Computing education
Dr David Overend

Areas of research interest:

  • Contemporary art practice and theory
  • Contemporary theatre and performance
  • Artistic/creative research
  • Creative approaches to space and place
  • Interdisciplinary learning and teaching
Dr Philippa Sheail

Areas of research interest:

  • Digital education
  • Distance education
  • Libraries
  • Organisational theory
  • Temporality
  • Ethnography
Dr ML White

Interested in issues related to:

  • social justice
  • ethnographic educational research
  • visual research methods
  • multimodal perspectives on urban schooling

Specifically, I am interested in how we prepare beginner teachers to work in areas of socio-economic disadvantage, reaching and teaching students in poverty and the consequences of what Ladson-Billings (2006) calls the educational debt. In addition to my work in teacher education, I am interested in and have written about developing civic media pedagogies, social geography and how young people experience space and place in education and learning.

Dr Ben Williamson

Interested in social scientific analyses of digital technologies, data, metrics, and the organizations that produce and promote them, in the field of education:

  • Critical social scientific studies of data or metrics in education policy and governance, in the schools and HE sectors
  • Education policy studies on digital technologies, technology companies, education businesses, think tanks, consultancies
  • Social science studies of data-centred sciences in education (e.g. digital psychometrics, biometrics, neuroscience, genetics)
  • Empirical studies of educational data use in practice

 

Not available to supervise

Dr Serdar Abaci

Areas of research interest:

  • Digital literacy for teachers
  • Data literacy in education
  • Online and blended learning
  • Technology-enabled assessment and feedback
  • Use of technology for teaching and learning
Professor Sian Bayne

Areas of research interest:

  • Higher education
  • Lifelong learning
  • Open education
  • Digital education
Dr Peter Evans

Areas of research interest:

  • Digital education
  • Higher Education
  • Digital education policy and strategy
  • Organisational theory
  • Informal and non-formal digital learning
  • Alternative credentials
Dr Michael Gallagher

Areas of research interest:

  • Digital education in the Global South
  • Education in Emergencies
  • Education in forced displacement contexts
  • Mobilities frameworks
  • Policy and practice around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
  • Emerging pedagogies
  • Educational futures
Professor Velda McCune

Areas of research interest:

  • Higher education for wicked problems 
  • Learning, teaching and curricula in higher education
  • Inclusive higher education
  • Academic identities
Professor Judy Robertson

Interested in computer science education schools, particularly data literacy.

Dr Jen Ross

Areas of research interest:

  • Digital-related topics with a critical and well-theorised perspective as they relate to Higher Education, cultural sector (museums and galleries), lifelong and informal learning
  • Education futures, speculative methods and pedagogies
  • Open education and online distance learning

Available to supervise

Dr Florence Bonacina-Pugh

Areas of research interest:

  • Language policy and practice in education
  • Bilingualism/multilingualism in education
  • Discourse analysis (Conversation Analysis)
  • The Internationalisation of higher education
Dr Madeleine Campbell

Areas of research interest:

  • Multimodality and language education
  • Translation and language education
  • Transdisciplinarity in language education
Dr Michele Saraiva Carilo

Areas of research interest:

  • Applied Linguistics
  • Critical multiculturalism
  • Critical pedagogy
  • Intercultural Language Education
  • Anti-prejudice inclusive language
  • Decolonisation of language teaching and learning
  • Social justice, diversity, and intersectionality in language education
  • Bilingualism/multilingualism in education
  • Language teacher education
  • Language curriculum development
  • Portuguese as a Foreign / Additional Language
  • Teaching Languages Other Than English (LOTEs)
  • Teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) 
  • Critical Digital Ethnography
  • Critical Ethnography
Dr Seongsook Choi

Areas of research interest:

  • Interaction (classroom interaction, professional interaction, interdisciplinary/intercultural interaction/communication)
  • Spoken, institutional, and professional discourse
  • Constructing identity
  • Interdisciplinary research engagements in Higher Education
Dr Maria Dasli

Areas of research interest:

  • Intercultural education
  • Intercultural communication
  • Intercultural citizenship
  • Intercultural dialogue and peacebuilding
  • Critical multiculturalism
  • Critical pedagogy
  • Social justice, inclusion and democracy
  • Ethics of responsibility and hospitality
  • Deconstruction
  • Ethnography
  • critical discourse analysis
  • anti-racist discourse
Dr Lorna Hamilton

Areas of research interest:

  • Identity - personal and professional
  • Teacher beliefs and values (early professional development)
  • Behaviour in schools and developing professional identity
  • Intercultural education and multicultural citizenship
  • Inclusion - critical approaches to giftedness - gifted and talented youth
  • Ability and ability grouping
  • The organization of learning
  • Pupil voice – absent voices
Dr Claudia Rosenhan

Areas of research interest:

  • Language and literature
  • Pedagogy
  • Ecocriticism/ecolinguistics
Dr Csabo Szabo

Areas of research interest:

  • Emotion vocabulary testing and learning
  • Vocabulary knowledge, learning and testing in multilingual contexts
  • Language assessment
  • Academic achievement in HE
  • Cognate recognition, processing and production
Dr Vander Viana

Areas of research interest:

  • Teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL)
  • English for academic purposes (EAP)
  • Corpus linguistics
  • Data-driven learning
  • Language teacher education
  • Academic/pedagogical discourse analysis
Dr Samaneh Zandian

Areas of research interest:

  • Second/ foreign language acquisition and learning for children of all ages
  • Innovative participatory research methodologies with children
  • Intercultural communication, social psychology and cross-cultural adaptation processes

I am currently interested in exploring international students’ educational, social and linguistic experiences in UK Higher Education.

 

Not available to supervise

Dr Farah Akbar

Areas of research interest:

  • English language learning and teaching
  • Evaluation and design of ELT materials
  • Individual differences in language learning
  • Language and identity
Dr Dario Banegas

Areas of research interest:

  • Language teacher education
  • Language curriculum development
  • CLIL
  • Materials development
  • Learner and teacher identity
  • Language learning/teaching motivation
  • Social justice and diversity (gender & sexuality) in language education
  • Action research
  • Content analysis
  • Mixed methods
  • Ethnography
Dr Ania Byerly

Areas of research interest:

  • Bi/multilingualism
  • English as an Additional Language (EAL)
  • Anti-racism
  • Critical multiculturalism
  • Pedagogy for antiracism in the Early Years and beyond
  • Social justice and inclusion
  • Teacher education and development related to all the areas above
Dr Sal Consoli

Areas of research interest:

  • Psychology of language education
  • Language practitioner research
  • Narrative inquiry
  • Applications of 'life capital' to educational research and practice
  • Internationalisation of (Higher) Education
Professor Do Coyle

Areas of research interest:

  • Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in school and tertiary sectors
  • Ecological frameworks for learning and Educational Linguistics
  • Immersion and bilingual education in classrooms including transdisciplinary studies, language-medium learning
  • PluriLiteracies and the role of language in meaning-making, conceptual development and intercultural understanding
  • Academic literacies (discourse, conceptual and intercultural thinking) in different disciplines, e.g. science, history, social sciences
  •  Transformative pedagogies and shared learning spaces for deeper learning
  • Pupils as researchers, teachers as researchers, student teachers as researchers
  • Theories of Practice
  • Classroom discourse
Dr Kenneth Fordyce

Areas of research interest:

  • Learner corpus research
  • Interlanguage pragmatics
  • Intercultural pragmatics
  • Internationalisation of higher education (linguistic and cultural issues)
  • Academic literacies
Dr Mike Lynch

Areas of research interest:

  • Modern language learning and teaching
  • Second language acquisition
  • L2 learning and teaching 
  • Communicative language teaching 
  • Language teacher cognition
Professor Velda McCune

Areas of research interest:

  • Higher education for wicked problems
  • Learning, teaching and curricula in higher education
  • Inclusive higher education
  • Academic identities
Dr Fiona O'Hanlon

Areas of research interest:

  • Bilingual education
  • Languages education
  • Attitudes to language
  • Language policy
  • Language planning
Dr Ashley Simpson

Areas of research interest:

Language Education: 

  • Intercultural education
  • Intercultural communication
  • Multilingualism
  • Discourses, identities and diversities in education

Social Justice and Inclusion: 

  • Critical approaches to democracy
  • Equality and human rights in education
  • Critical approaches and theories of Global Education

Methodologies: 

  • Discourse analysis
  • Conversation analysis
  • Dialogism
Dr Isobel Kai-Hui Wang

Areas of research interest:

  • Language learner strategies
  • Vocabulary learning strategies
  • Strategy-based instruction
  • Second/foreign vocabulary teaching and learning

Available to supervise

Dr Fatih Aktas

Areas of research interest:

  • Comparative and International Education
  • Higher Education from a comparative and international perspective
  • Creativity, innovation, global citizenship in Higher Education
  • Education Financing
Dr Shereen Benjamin

Areas of research interest:

  • Gender and education (particularly schooling)
  • Inclusive education
  • Intersections of gender, disability and social class
  • Developing feminist poststructuralist and Marxist theories/methodologies
Professor Catherine Bovill

Areas of research interest:

  • Co-created curriculum
  • Student-staff partnership in learning, teaching
  • Higher education curriculum conceptualisation
  • Relational pedagogy, belonging, mattering and student engagement
Dr Hazel Christie

Areas of research interest:

  • Student identities in HE 
  • Widening participation and access to university
  • Student transitions into and through university
  • Student agency and student voice in the curriculum
Dr Kirsten Darling-McQuistan

Areas of research interest:

  • Inclusive education
  • Early years education
  • Sustainability
  • Arts-based methods
Dr Jacqueline Dohaney

Areas of research interest:

  • University and higher education
  • University STEM education
  • Geosciences and climate change education
  • Student being-and-becoming
  • Using Bourdieu to unpack access, belonging, and retention in higher education
  • Philosophy of education
Dr Adriana Duta

Areas of research interest:

  • Social stratification and social mobility
  • Social inequalities in education, the labour market and family demography
  • School attainment | Higher education | Graduates’ labour market outcomes 
  • Life course | Longitudinal analysis
  • Cross-national comparative research
  • Quantitative methods | Large-scale survey and administrative data
Dr Gary Fraser

Areas of research interest:

  • Informal education
  • Community learning and development
  • Adult education
Professor Deborah (Debi) Fry

Areas of research interest:

  • Safe and inclusive education
  • Burden of violence on educational and learning outcomes
  • Violence in childhood
  • Child protection
  • Bullying
  • Corporal punishment/discipline
  • Gangs
  • Conflict-affected societies, insecurity and education
  • Refugees, forced migration, asylum seekers, unaccompanied and separated children & education
  • Education and development
  • Teacher training for social justice
  • Peacebuilding
Dr Ian Fyfe

Areas of research interest:

  • Youth studies/sociology of youth
  • Youth work
  • Education for citizenship
Dr Jule Hildmann

Areas of research interest:

  • Personal and social development
  • Experiential learning
  • Outdoor environmental education
  • Outdoor learning (and taking the curriculum outdoors), leadership (theory, styles, etc.) in education
  • Facilitation of individual and group processes
  • Creative approaches to learning
  • Emotions and learning
Dr Deborah Holt

Areas of research interest:

  • Positive mental health promotion in education 
  • Health and wellbeing
  • Wellbeing promotion
  • Pastoral care of pupils in schools and students in universities
  • Anything related to promoting the social, emotional and mental wellbeing of learners, e.g. resilience, emotional literacy, co-operative learning, resolving conflict
  • Metacognitive approaches in the classroom
Dr Lindsey Horner

Areas of research interest:

  • Education and development
  • Peacebuilding education
  • Peace education
  • Education and conflict

Postdevelopment approaches:

  • Popular education/community organising (in developing contexts)
  • Arts-based research methods
  • Participatory research methods
  • Ethnography
Professor Cristina Iannelli

Areas of research interest:

  • Social stratification in education and the labour market
  • Social mobility
  • Youth transitions
  • Cross-country comparative analyses
  • Quantitative data analysis
Dr Jennifer Kirkwood

Areas of research interest:

  • Sociology of education elites
  • Power and inequalities
  • Social mobility and educational strategies
  • Elite education and education of elites
  • International education
Dr Kristina Konstantoni

Areas of research interest:

  • Children's and young people's social identities and attitudes
  • Diversity, equity/fairness/social justice practices
  • Children's and young people's rights and participation in research, policy and practice
  • Intersectionality
  • Partnerships between research, policy and practice
  • Methodologies of research with children and young people
  • Ethical issues in research with children and young people
  • Early years and professionalism
  • Early learning and care 
Dr Stuart Moir

Areas of research interest:

  • Citizenship education and learning for democracy
  • Critical pedagogy
  • Marxist analysis and critique of education
  • Adult education and popular/radical education
  • Youth political participation and activism
  • Youth work in schools
  • Critical social research and professional practice learning
Dr Nataša Pantić

Areas of research interest: 

  • Teacher agency
  • Educational change
  • Relationships in an education setting
  • Mixed-method social network analysis  
Dr Margaret Petrie

Areas of research interest:

  • The role of informal education in promoting or inhibiting social justice and participatory democracy
  • Community engagement
  • Community-based research
  • Co-constructing knowledge with communities
Professor John Ravenscroft

Areas of research interest:

  • Visual impairment
  • Adaptive sport
  • Sensory impairment
  • Hearing impairment
  • Inclusion
  • Philosophy of education/ Virtue epistemology
Dr Andie Reynolds

Areas of research interest:

  • Working with children and young people for social justice
  • Children and young people’s participation in policymaking
  • Youth work and mental health
  • Refugee education / Education in Emergencies

I am also very interested in working with doctoral students looking to use indigenous, decolonial, intersectional, feminist or post-structuralist methodologies and methods.

Professor Sheila Riddell

Areas of research interest:

  • Additional support needs
  • Higher education
  • Equality and social justice
Dr Heidi Smith

Outdoor Environmental Education with particular interest in:

  • pedagogy
  • leadership
  • transculturality
  • international perspectives
  • nature connection
  • learning communities
  • initial teacher education
Dr Laura Wright

Areas of research interest:

  • Participatory methods (play and arts-based)
  • Child rights
  • Co-research/coproduction with children and young people
  • Child and youth activism
  • Outdoor play
  • Mental health and psychosocial wellbeing
  • Children and young people's mental health and wellbeing

 

Please contact regarding availability to supervise

Dr Omolabake Fakunle

Areas of research interest:

  • Internationalisation of higher education (including policy development in different global regions)
  • International student/staff mobility
  • Intercultural experiences in education
  • Inclusive internationalisation
  • Internationalising the curriculum
  • Digitilisation of international higher education
  • Graduate employability
Dr Callum McGregor

 

Not available to supervise

Dr Simon Beames

Areas of research interest:

  • Outdoor adventure education
  • Outdoor adventure recreation/leisure
  • Learning outside the classroom
Dr Katie Cebula

Areas of research interest:

  • Social-cognitive and social-emotional development
  • Children with additional support needs (particularly Down’s syndrome, Williams syndrome and autism)
  • Family (e.g. sibling relationships)
  • Children’s play
Dr Lisa Fernandes

Areas of research interest:

  • Autism
  • Inclusion
  • Teacher education
  • Learning support assistants
Dr Jingyi Li

Areas of research interest:

  • Education Policy development
  • International education
  • Globalisation
Professor Gillean McCluskey

Areas of research interest:

  • Exclusion from school
  • Youth at risk
  • Behaviour and relationships in school
  • Troubled and troublesome pupils
  • Restorative approaches in school
  • Relationships between youth crime and education
  • Pupil voice
  • Marginalised groups in education
Professor Velda McCune

Areas of research interest:

  • Higher education for wicked problems
  • Learning, teaching and curricula in higher education
  • Inclusive higher education
  • Academic identities
Dr Rachel O'Neill

Areas of research interest:

  • Deaf education
  • Language policies at any level in relation to signed languages
  • Science discussion and deaf learners
  • Online reading and deaf learners
  • Monitoring deaf children's early language acquisition in speech and sign
  • Transition of deaf young people from school to college, university and work
Dr William Smith

Areas of research interest:

  • Education and international development
  • Comparative education
  • Global governance and international organisations
  • Testing and accountability in education

Note that I focus on the primary and secondary level.


Available to supervise

Dr Mike Ashford

My current research has included a number of key themes:

  • player decision making in rugby union and team sports
  • talent identification and development
  • the role of challenge and emotional disturbance in player development
  • coach planning and decision making
  • coaching practice
  • skill acquisition
  • coach development

Presently, I am undertaking a number of projects which include: 

  • developing and implementing shared mental models of performance
  • the impact of law modifications on coach, player and referee behaviour
  • team coordination, player decision making, coach expertise, and understanding athletes' true experiences in Olympic sports 

Generally, my research explores a wide array of concepts central to the role of a coach and/or coach developer.

Dr Graham Baker

Areas of research interest:

  • Physical activity
  • Walking
  • Cycling
  • Active travel/transport Interventions
  • Health inequalities
  • Ethnicity
  • Exercise prescription
  • Exercise Rehabilitation
  • Behaviour change
  • Prevention, management of overweight and obesity
  • Health psychology
  • Measurement of health behaviours
Dr Davies Banda

Areas of research interest:

  • Sport and international development
  • Sport and social inclusion
  • African political settings and sport
Dr Ray Bobrownicki 

Areas of research interest:

  • Coaching instruction/practice
  • Performing under pressure
  • Motor learning/control
  • Impact of sporting structures and policies on athlete identity, welfare, and rights
Dr Howie Carson

Areas of research interest:

  • Sports coaching
  • Motor learning and control
Dr Pippa Chapman

Areas of research interest:

  • Elite sport policy, with a particular focus on Olympic and Paralympic sports
  • Keen interest in leadership and governance in sport and the relationship between sport policy and health policy
Professor Dave Collins

Areas of research interest:

  • Performance enhancement and support
  • Coach development
  • Talent development
  • Expertise
Dr Loel Collins

Areas of research interest:

  • Theory and practice of coaching, coach development and education in outdoor activities, action and adventure sports
  • Judgement and decision-making in complex and consequential environments
Dr Shirley Gray

Areas of research interest:

  • Physical education
  • Health and wellbeing (health, the body and healthism discourse)
  • PE pedagogy and curriculum
  • Motivation, self-regulation and self-determination
  • Student engagement in PE
  • Girls' participation in PE
  • Team games pedagogy and decision-making
  • Masculinity and PE
  • Teacher learning and research
Professor Grant Jarvie

Areas of research interest:

  • Sport, social sciences, politics
  • Scottish sports policy
  • Sport diplomacy and cultural/international relations
  • Political economy of sport
  • Football (including fan engagement strategies for clubs)
  • The future of sport
  • Data-driven Innovation and the sports industry
  • Sport for peace and conflict resolution
  • Sport, poverty and inequality
  • Sport and health ( including planetary health)
Dr Mike Jess

Areas of research interest:

  • Complexity thinking
  • Curriculum and pedagogy
  • Policy
  • Physical education, particularly primary physical education
Dr John Kelly

Areas of research interest:

  • Sport and culture/fandom
  • Media analyses and sport
  • Militarism (civil-military relations) and sport
  • 'Sectarianism' and sport
  • PE and the body (socio-cultural issues)
  • Symbolic interactionism (sociological theory)
  • Sub-cultures in sport
  • Offensiveness, language and discourse in sport
Dr Paul Kelly

Areas of research interest:

  • Walking, cycling and active travel
  • Health behaviour measurement
  • Health behaviour change
Dr Jung Woo (Jay) Lee

Areas of research interest:

  • Sport media and communication
  • Sport and globalisation
  • Sports mega-events studies
  • Sports and international relations
  • Sociology of sport
  • Sport and social identities
  • Sport and social theories
  • Sport and semiotics
Dr Georgios Machtsiras

Areas of research interest:

  • Swimming
  • Sports biomechanics
  • Dance biomechanics
Dr Justine MacLean

Areas of research interest:

  • Social sciences and policy
  • Curriculum
  • Agency
  • Identity
  • Resilience
Dr Alan MacPherson

Areas of research interest:

  • Rhythm for expertise
  • Instructional technique/coaching
  • Sources of information for movement
Dr Amanda Martindale

Areas of research interest:

  • Professional judgement and decision-making
  • Accelerating expertise (individuals and teams)
  • Mindfulness
  • Performance psychology

Please note - the context of research can be diverse and involve an element of risk (e.g., sport, medicine, emergency services, military, business)

Dr Matthew (Matt) McDowell

Areas of research interest:

  • ‘Second-order’ sporting events
  • The history of football
  • Sport on the North Atlantic Rim
  • The patronage of sport by industrialists, politicians and landowners
  • Sport, material culture and the politics of representation
  • Scottish/British sport, Empire, and decolonisation
  • Lifestyle sports in Scotland
  • The history of education (including physical education)
  • North American sport
  • The Scottish diaspora and sport
  • The history and politics of baseball
  • Hillwalking, land politics and environmentalism
Dr Paul McMillan

Areas of research interest:

  • Physical education, particularly in secondary schools
  • The 'Sport Education' model
  • Curriculum
  • Pedagogy
  • Teachers' everyday practices
  • Teacher-pupil interaction, qualitative classroom research
  • Naturalistic inquiry
  • Qualitative research methods, self-study
Dr Christine Nash

Areas of research interest:

  • Sport coaching
  • Coach education
  • Talent development
  • Development of expertise
  • Mentoring
Dr Deborah (Debbie) Palmer

Areas of research interest:

  • Sports injury and illness epidemiology, risk and prevention
  • Longer-term consequences of injury (e.g. osteoarthritis)
  • Retired athlete health
  • Sport-related concussion
  • Elite, recreational, community and youth sport cohorts
  • Trauma and orthopaedics
  • Clinical cohorts
Dr Stelios Psycharakis

Areas of research interest:

  • Biomechanics of swimming and other aquatic sports
  • Aquatic rehabilitation, in particular for chronic low back pain patients, sufferers of other MSDs and the elderly
  • Clinical biomechanics
  • Applied biomechanics in sports
  • Human performance science
  • Physical activity and health
Dr Hugh Richards

Areas of research interest:

  • Coping
  • Talent
  • Individual differences and professional development related to sport, military and music
Dr Walker Ross

Areas of research interest:

  • Climate change
  • Olympic Games
  • Environmental justice
  • Space utilization and land development
Dr Dave Saunders

Areas of research interest:

  • Life after stroke
  • Physical activity
  • Systematic review
Dr Isla Shill

Areas of research interest:

  • Sports injury epidemiology, risk factors, and prevention
  • Sport-related concussion
  • Community and youth sport cohorts
Dr Wendy Timmons

I am interested in supervising Doctoral work related to the application of dance science and education to dance practice. For example: 

  • Digital  technology that supports teaching and learning in the dance studio  
  • Dance, health and wellbeing 
  • Dance and dementia 
  • Dance education
Dr Vander Viana

Areas of research interest:

  • Teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL)
  • English for academic purposes (EAP)
  • Corpus linguistics
  • Data-driven learning
  • Language teacher education
  • Academic/pedagogical discourse analysis
Dr Martine Verheul

Areas of research interest:

  • Motor Control
  • Motor coordination
  • Perception and movement
  • Motor development
  • Disability sport

 

Please contact regarding availability to supervise

Dr Neil Buchanan
Dr Marie Murphy
Dr Jamie Taylor

 

Not available to supervise

Dr Josie Booth

My research seeks to understand and support how children learn and the relationships with their health behaviour (e.g. physical activity and obesity). Much of my research involves school-based programmes which are often co-created with teachers and pupils and includes neurodiverse populations, such as ADHD. I use a range of methodology in my research, such as Randomised Controlled Trials, Secondary data analysis of longitudinal data sets, and systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Dr Nicola Carse

Areas of research interest:

  • Primary physical education
  • Teacher education
  • Teacher professional learning
  • Educational change
  • Curriculum development
  • Complexity thinking

Methodologically, I am interested in self-study and the use of observation and interview as research methods.

Dr Samantha Fawkner

Areas of research interest:

  • Young people
  • Physical activity
  • Sedentary behaviour
  • Body composition
Dr Claire Fitzsimons

Areas of research interest:

  • Sedentary behaviour and older adults
  • Physical activity and older adults
Dr Andrew Horrell

Areas of research interest:

  • Teacher professional learning
  • Curriculum development
  • Educational policy and curriculum enactment
  • Physical education curriculum, pedagogy and assessment
  • Physical education teacher education

I specialise in areas of enquiry which draw on qualitative research methods.

Dr Linda Linton
Dr Sarah MacIsaac

Areas of research interest:

  • Health and the body from a sociological perspective
  • Social media and the body
  • Embodied identities
  • Young people's experiences of, and engagements with, the PE environment
  • Ethnographic research methods
Professor Ailsa Niven

Areas of research interest:

  • Psychological determinants and consequences of physical activity and sedentary behaviour
  • Walking for health
  • Health in adolescents
Dr Shaun Phillips

Areas of research interest:

  • Fatigue mechanisms in sport and exercise
  • Self-regulation of sport and exercise performance
  • Perceptions of high-intensity interval exercise
  • Sport and exercise interventions for individuals with neurological impairment
Dr Gavin Reid

Areas of research interest: 

  • Sport and the city
  • Sport and social enterprise
  • Sport and event legacies
  • Sport and the politics of dissent/protest
  • Sport and local government austerity
  • Sport and social exclusion
Dr Shari Sabeti

Areas of research interest:

  • Arts education (including literature, graphic novels and the visual arts)
  • Cultural heritage education
  • Museum education
  • Creative writing
  • Anthropology of education
  • Education in the global south
  • Education and development
  • Literacy in its social context
  • Projects focused around ethnography as the primary approach to research
  • Projects interested in using visual or arts-based methodologies
Dr Tony Turner

Areas of research interest:

  • Human performance science
  • Motorsport physiology & performance
  • Cardio-respiratory systems’ responses during exercise
  • Physiology of strength & conditioning
  • Concussion
Dr Matthew (Matt) Weston

Research interest: Applied sports science


Available to supervise

Dr Ramsey Affifi

Areas of research interest:

  • Environmental, sustainability and outdoor education
  • Philosophy of education
  • Environmental humanities 
  • "Ecologising" education
  • Integrating art into science education 
  • Re-imagining STEAM education 
  • Aesthetics
  • Emotions and contemplative approaches to education (especially in response to the ecological crisis)
  • Post-qualitative and arts-informed research methods
Professor Catherine Bovill

Areas of research interest:

  • Co-created curriculum
  • Student-staff partnership in learning, teaching
  • Higher education curriculum conceptualisation
  • Relational pedagogy, belonging, mattering and student engagement
Dr Mary Bovill

Areas of research interest:

  • Conceptions of texts and textual practices in English and history 
  • Philosophy in prisons
  • Philosophy with children
  • Critical thinking
Dr Audrey Cameron

I am available to supervise deaf, deafblind and hard-of-hearing students on topics related to science education and sign languages. 

Dr Sue Chapman

Areas of research interest:

  • Teacher wellbeing
  • Teacher professional learning
  • Teacher identity
  • Initial teacher education
  • Teacher/student teacher mentoring
Dr David Clarke

Environmental and sustainability education (formal and informal) practice, policy, philosophy and research methodology with a focus on the following approaches:

  • Practitioner inquiry and participatory action research
  • Narrative, autobiographical, and autoethnographic inquiry
  • Philosophical inquiry, writing as inquiry, thinking/living with theory, creative-relational and post-qualitative inquiry
  • Immanent ontologies, including animisms, affect theory, feminist new materialisms and posthumanism
Dr Laura Colucci-Gray

Areas of research interest:

  • Science education
  • Sustainability education
  • Outdoor learning
  • STEAM education
  • Citizen science
  • Interactive and participatory research methodologies
Dr Maria Dasli

Areas of research interest:

  • Intercultural education
  • Intercultural communication
  • Intercultural citizenship
  • Intercultural dialogue and peacebuilding
  • Critical multiculturalism
  • Critical pedagogy
  • Social justice, inclusion and democracy
  • Ethics of responsibility and hospitality
  • Deconstruction
  • Ethnography
  • Critical discourse analysis
  • Anti-racist discourse
Dr Andrea English

Areas of research interest:

  • Philosophy of education, especially Dewey, and the classical German tradition 
  • Phenomenology and pragmatism
  • Topics of moral education
  • Dialogic teaching
  • Pupil voice
  • Critical thinking
Dr Lauren Hammond

Areas of research interest:

  • Children’s geographies
  • Geography education
  • Curriculum
  • Geographies of education and education spaces
  • Children’s rights
  • Participatory research methods
Dr James MacAllister

Areas of research interest:

  • Philosophical inquiries into any educational issue/s
  • Ethics, values and moral education
  • Epistemology and education - what types of knowledge and curricula are valuable and why
  • Issues concerning discipline and/or punishment in educational settings
  • Alternative schooling 
Dr Ann MacDonald

Areas of research interest:

  • Gender
  • Religious culture and experience
  • Gender and feminism in religion
  • Religion and schooling
  • Teacher culture
  • Women teachers
  • Primary teaching as work
  • Schooling in Scotland
  • Social justice
Professor Gale Macleod

Areas of research interest:

  • Social, emotional and behavioural problems
  • School disaffection
  • Behaviour
  • Exclusion/inclusion
  • Authority relationships
  • Medicalisation of behaviour
Dr Geetha Marcus

Experiences:

  • BAME teachers and student teachers
  • Gypsy/Travellers 
  • "Migrant" and/or "refugee" women and girls

Also:

  • Culturally relevant pedagogies for teaching the new century child
  • Translingualism and Translanguaging 
  • Black feminist methodology (otherwise known an intersectionality)
  • Oral history
Dr Aline Nardo

Areas of research interest:

  • Philosophy of Education, in particular topics connected to Dewey, Vygotsky, Marxism and Critical Theory
  • Topics at the intersection of Evolution and Education
  • Philosophical/conceptual/historical work on ‘learning’ and ‘development’
  • Theory and design related to ‘ethics and play’ (digital and analogue) in educational contexts
Professor Robbie Nicol

Areas of research interest:

  • Outdoor environmental education (theory and practice)
  • Environmental philosophy
  • Epistemological diversity (different ways of knowing)
  • Experiential learning
  • Sustainable development
  • Education
  • Learning for sustainability
  • Cultural perspectives on environmental education
Dr David Overend

Areas of research interest:

  • Contemporary theatre and performance
  • Artistic/creative research
  • Creative approaches to space and place
  • Interdisciplinary learning and teaching
Dr Dimitra Tsakalou

Areas of research interest:

  • Inclusive education
  • Equality and social justice
  • Perceptions and practices on inclusion
  • Inclusive practices

 

Please contact regarding availaibility to supervise

Dr Hui-Chuan (Jane) Li

Areas of research interest:

  • Curriculum materials design and development, particularly in relation to mathematics
  • Social constructivism in mathematics teaching and learning
  • Development of students’ mathematical proficiency with meaningful grounding
  • Learning for sustainability in mathematics education
  • Learning, teaching and assessment
  • Classroom discussion and communication
  • International and comparative education
Dr Holly Linklater

Areas of research interest:

  • Autoethnography
  • Ethnography
  • Practitioner research
  • Teacher research
  • Inclusion
  • Pedagogy (especially primary schools/ early years); Teachers' creative/imaginative thinking (with regard to pedagogic decision-making)

 

Not available to supervise

Professor Gert Biesta

Areas of research interest:

  • Educational theory 
  • Education policy
  • Curriculum
  • Teaching
  • Teacher education 
  • Citizenship education
  • Arts education
  • Religious education
Dr Beth Christie

Areas of research interest:

  • Practical, theoretical and philosophical aspects of outdoor learning and learning for sustainability
  • The developing policy landscape in Scotland in relation to outdoor learning, learning for sustainability and the curriculum
Dr Lisa Fernandes

Areas of research interest:

  • Autism
  • Inclusion
  • Teacher education
  • Learning support assistants
Dr Yvonne Foley

Areas of research interest:

  • Language teacher education
  • Teachers' beliefs and identities
  • Literacy development for pupils learning English as an additional language (EAL)
  • Critical literacies
  • Second/additional language learning and teaching
Professor Peter Higgins

Areas of research interest:

  • Theory, philosophy and practice of outdoor education/outdoor learning
  • Theory, philosophy and practice of environmental and sustainability education 
  • International comparative approaches to outdoor, environmental and sustainability education
  • Coaching and skill acquisition in outdoor activities
Dr Donna Murray

Areas of research interest:

  • Taught postgraduate student experience
  • Masters provision
  • Self-efficacy
Dr Zoe Robertson

Areas of research interest:

  • Teacher education
  • Teacher professional learning and development
  • School leadership and leadership development/preparation

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