Presidential Fellowships job advert

For informal enquiries please contact:

Dr Minna Vuohelainen, Associate Dean – Research and Innovation

The School welcomes applications for Presidential Fellowships located in the Departments of Journalism; Media, Culture and Creative Industries; and Performing Arts (including SPARC, our centre for Sound Practice and Research at City), in the following strategic priority areas:

• Creative intelligence and practice, creativity and wellbeing
• Diversity, decolonisation and social justice in relation to communication and creativity
• Journalism, safety and media freedom: policy creation and implementation
• Media production, social media, public relations and communication, AI and creativity, podcasting
• Creative and interdisciplinary sound practices involving improvisation, performance, sound art, and technology; sound studies and sonic ecology.

Applications for fellowships crossing departmental boundaries and/ or including interdisciplinary or practice-based elements are welcome.

Fellows working in these areas would make a significant contribution to SCC research culture and REF preparations, including Impact activities.

If suitable applicants present themselves, we are keen to place one of the fellows in SPARC, where the fellow would be able to contribute to public-engagement work and help to develop the centre’s activities.

For informal enquiries please contact:

Professor Vasso Ioannidou, Associate Dean, Research & Enterprise

Presidential Fellows will join a group of researchers in some of the School’s main research areas and research centres or centres of excellence. These include the areas of:

• Responsible enterprise and charities (e.g. ETHOS: the Centre for Responsible Enterprise, Centre for Charity Effectiveness)
• Banking and finance (e.g. Centre for Asset Management Research, Centre for Banking Research, Mergers and Acquisitions Research Centre)
• Professions and professionals (e.g. Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice, Centre for Professional Service Firms)
• Digital innovation (e.g. Digital Leadership Research Centre, Bayes X)
• Risks and analytics (e.g. Insurance, actuarial analytics expertise in the Faculty of Actuarial Science and Insurance)

For informal enquiries please contact:

Professor Leanne Aitken, Associate Dean – Research, Enterprise and Global Engagement

SHPS welcomes applications in the following three cross-cutting themes as research areas for strategic development and investment across the School:

1. Inequalities in health, research and practice
2. Intervention development, testing, and/or implementation
3. Coproduction and participatory approaches to research.

Inequalities in health, research and practice

This considers inequalities in health status, health, community and social care and research into these inequalities.

Inequalities give rise to differential access, experiences, and outcomes and links to longstanding concerns.

In addition to the general emphasis on inequalities, people (across the lifespan) with health conditions, differences, and disabilities are at even greater risk of inequalities.

Intervention development and testing, and/or implementation (IDI)

IDI has become a rigorous evidence-based field in the last 20 years, in health and social care, public health, and community settings with the development of guidance on complex interventions and numerous intervention frameworks (see examples).

IDI provides researchers with clear frameworks for conceptualising, conducting, and reporting interventions that optimise the likely acceptability, feasibility, and benefit for stakeholders.

Rigour in IDI provides a solid foundation for transferable benefits to a range of different research questions and fields.

Coproduction and participatory approaches to research

This relates to a way of working in partnership by sharing power amongst those involved in research, practice, and services.

It involves reconsideration of culture, structure, practice, and review/ evaluation processes.

It is championed by peak bodies relevant to SHPS e.g., the Social Care Institute of Excellence, NHS England, and related concepts including patient and public involvement are core to peak health research bodies e.g., NIHR.

For informal enquiries please contact:

Professor David Townend, Associate Dean – Research & Enterprise

The School especially welcomes applications for Presidential Fellowships in thes areas:

Engaging Policy: From the Law School to Public Policy

The Fellow will work with a number of colleagues across The City Law School to help negotiate policies and guidelines developed through research in the school into legislative, regulatory or governance processes.

The successful applicant will have undertaken research in the operation of administrative or constitutional law, such that they have a strong understanding of the mechanisms through which policy and guidance is adopted.

Understanding the Legal Profession

The City Law School is well-known for its excellence in research, scholarship and education in relation to the legal profession.

The Fellow will help to coordinate this area of the School’s work through, inter alia, bringing colleagues together in cross-cutting discussions and in developing new research and scholarship projects.

The applicant will have experience and expertise in studying the legal profession or other analogous profession.

For informal enquiries please contact:

Professor Inderjeet Parmar, Associate Dean - Research and Enterprise.

We would especially welcome Presidential Fellowship applications in the area of policy development and, more specifically, policy implementation in the following areas:

Policing

The Fellow would work alongside an established research group with evidence of both impact and grant capture as well as national level collaborations with the College of Policing.

We have already identified this area as a priority for future investment and we have currently allocated 3 doctoral scholarships to this project starting in 2023.

As part of the wider criminology grouping, we believe that we can develop policing as a key strength of both the school and the university engaging with a range of practitioners both within and outside the police service (victims support and the broader criminal justice community).

Violence and Migration

The Fellow will work across the school around the theme of violence and migration and will help several currently relatively isolated researchers come together to create a route to further impact.

The main strength of this grouping lies in the potential for greater collaboration both internally (within city) and across the various stakeholder groups with which they have engaged (UK Home office and Foreign Office, EU and UNHCR).

We are also looking to develop postgraduate taught provision in this area with a proposed joint degree with Paris Daupine in Peace Studies building on their existing relationships with established practitioners in this area.

As well as government directly engaged in this area, we intend to collaborate with a range of NGOs involved in support for migrant groups as well as a number of high-level think tanks.

Part of the role of the Presidential Fellow will be to make these linkages, particularly with NGOs and to help to create a coherent body of research around which national and international policy initiatives can be both shaped, implemented and evaluated.

Cyberbullying and Online Harms

This work on the regulation of cyber bullying has been building momentum at SPGA, including the recent award of a highly competitive Ofcom contract, in a research collaboration with NatCen colleagues, to research cyber-bullying, online abuse and harassment among children.

The Transformation of Democratic Political Competition

This connects domestic and international politics with a focus on change and global crisis; major focus of research funding, impact cases and external engagement in IPE, transformation of party politics, social movements and interest groups; trade unions and centre-left parties in Western Europe; built on long term external engagement and a major grant.

Economics of Crime and Violence

The ground-breaking and impactful work with police and businesses and related work to develop professional certification and training for BCRP managers.

For informal enquiries please contact:

Professor Alfredo Pinelli, Associate Dean – Research & Enterprise

The School would particularly welcome applications for Presidential Fellowships in two areas:

AI and Engineering Optimisation

This concerns the application of AI techniques to optimisation problems in classical engineering applications.

Examples could be optimisation of fluid mechanics and heat transfer processes, closure of partial differential equations, complex control problems, structural optimisations with uncertainties, development of surrogate models for complex engineering systems, application of AI to bio-engineering problems to mention just a few.

These complex engineering systems involve many design variables, multiple and often contradictory objectives to optimise, dynamic constraints across the lifecycle, and multiple “right” solutions.

The nature of the problem can be quantitative and qualitative in nature. AI, e.g. genetic algorithms, and other classical optimisation approaches combined with deep learning and fuzzy logic models could optimise the quantitative and qualitative models.

The research will focus on automating the large-scale multi-variable, multi-objective, multi-modal optimisation problems with dynamic constraints using the high-performance computing available at City and National supercomputing facilities.

Quantum computing for classical engineering software solutions

This area concerns the adaptation to quantum computing of classical engineering software tools.

Structural mechanics, fluid mechanics and many other physical systems are commonly modelled by systems of partial differential equations (PDEs), similarly many structural optimisations for aeroengines to civil engineering applications rely on significant computational effort.

Except for very simple cases where analytical solutions exist, the use of numerical methods is required to find approximate solutions.

However, for many problems of practical interest, the computational cost of classical numerical solvers running on classical, silicon-based computer hardware, becomes prohibitive.

Quantum computing, though still in its infancy, holds the promise of enabling a new generation of algorithms that can execute the most cost-demanding parts of PDE solvers and are exponentially faster than classical methods, at least theoretically.

Also, increasing research and availability of quantum computing hardware spurs the hope of scientists and engineers to start using quantum computers for solving PDE problems more effectively.