Applications from partner institutions

• Being real at work: authenticity and identity in the age of AI

  Business School - Management

  Dr Xi Xi
  Email: xx27@st-andrews.ac.uk

  As artificial intelligence increasingly shapes modern workplaces, questions arise about what it means to be authentic at work. Authenticity is often associated with self-awareness, moral integrity and acting in alignment with one’s values. Yet, the rise of AI challenges these assumptions by transforming how people communicate, collaborate and perform emotional or intellectual labour.

  
  The aim of the project is to explore how young professionals negotiated tensions between organisational expectations, technological efficiency and their sense of self. Early-career employees often face heightened identity work as they learn to navigate professional norms, manage impressions and establish credibility. At the same time, they are more likely to use AI tools fluently and integrate them into daily tasks, making them an ideal group to study authenticity and identity in the age of AI. The project asks: when do people feel they are being themselves at work? How do AI tools shape their experience? What strategies help sustain authenticity in AI-augmented environments?

  
  The scholar may choose appropriate qualitative or mixed methods to gather insights from early-career employees. Potential areas of focus include ethical decision-making or the emotional dimensions of human-AI interaction.

  
  By examining authenticity through the lens of technological change, the project contributes to ongoing debates on responsible management and the future of work. The findings will provide practical insights for educators and organisations seeking to nurture self-aware, ethical and authentic leaders in an increasingly digital world.

• Caring Across Generations: The Long-Term Economic Effects of Dual Care Responsibilities

  Business School - Economics

  Dr Irina Merkurieva
  Email: im58@st-andrews.ac.uk 

  The project will use data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) 1958, one of the major British birth cohort studies, to examine the economic effects of double caring responsibilities—the combined burden of childcare and eldercare—on labour supply, earnings trajectories, and retirement wealth.
  
  The “double caring” phenomenon predominantly affects women, who often spend significant portions of their working lives providing unpaid care to children and, later, to aging relatives. These caregiving interruptions can reduce lifetime earnings, limit career progression, and result in lower accumulated pension wealth. The 1958 cohort offers a unique opportunity to study these dynamics over the full life course, from early adulthood to retirement age.
  
  The project aims to: (1) quantify the total amount of time individuals spend on caregiving across different life stages; (2) identify the key demographic, social, and economic factors influencing these patterns; and (3) assess how caregiving histories contribute to observed gender gaps in retirement wealth.
  
  Using longitudinal methods and regression analysis, the project will provide evidence on the long-term economic costs of unpaid care. The findings will contribute to policy discussions on how to better support caregivers and mitigate gender inequality in later-life economic security.

• Cathedral Economics

  Prof Ian Smith
  Email: is@st-andrews.ac.uk 

  This project will use recent financial data from the accounts of 42 Anglican cathedrals in England and other resources to investigate the factors which affect their financial viability. These include consideration of factors such as rising costs, aging infrastructure, visitor revenue and investments in the environmental sustainability of historic buildings. The implications of the funding challenges for the debate over Cathedral entry pricing and the case for a state subsidy will be discussed. 

• De-militarising Antiquity

  Dr Alice König
  Email: arw6@st-andrews.ac.uk 

  For centuries, our contact with Greco-Roman antiquity has had militarising impacts. Whether we encounter it in popular culture (novels, films, gaming, etc) or via the education system, ancient myth-history is dominated by battle and military heroes – and it can engender ideas of war as normal, natural and even admirable or desirable. This project will investigate that trend, identifying key focal points of militarisation and attempting to measure their impacts. It will also explore ways to counter-act it, by identify ways in which we can engage differently with antiquity, paying more attention to non-violence and peacebuilding. This could involve creative solutions, such as the design of an online peace game set in antiquity, or the development of education resources that resist everyday militarisms.

  This project will be of particular interest to students who are interested in the following research topics:

  • Peace and conflict studies
  • Peace education
  • Applied classics

• Exam design and resiliency to AI

  Business School - Economics

  Dr Luc Bridet
  Email: lb222@st-andrews.ac.uk

  Exam design and resiliency to AI. Depending on student interests and skillsets, this could be largely a statistics project (both descriptive and analytical, reviewing past practice) or an experimental project (formally testing different exam variants on generative AIs).

• Faith and the Filmstrip

  Department of Film Studies

  Prof Tom Rice
  Email: twtr@st-andrews.ac.uk

  “Faith and the Filmstrip” is an archival research project that will help the Laidlaw scholar develop independent research skills – working with previously-unaccessed materials – while also contributing to a larger AHRC-DFG-funded project, “Relocating Filmstrips, Remapping Europe.”
  
  The larger project closes a gap in media history by studying the filmstrip, a series of still images often with an accompanying commentary projected for the purposes of civic instruction and education across the globe. For this European project, we are locating mid-20th century filmstrips and related materials (lecture notes, audio commentary, educational journals, photographs) in myriad archives, building a filmstrip database and initiating creative and educational public engagement activities.
  
  The Laidlaw scholar will focus on the use of filmstrips by British missionary organisations. They will initially examine and contextualise the extensive (and expanding) collections at the National Library of Scotland (NLS, a project partner), before identifying (and, subject to scheduling, visiting) further collections, ultimately presenting their findings through creative and academic outputs.
  
  The scholar will have access to rarely-seen, critically-neglected materials at the NLS, gaining practical experience within archival institutions. They can also contribute to curatorial discussions for a virtual exhibition and conference, gaining experience in leadership and collaborative work.
  
  Faith and the Filmstrip provides the scholar with extensive mentorship – from scholars and archivists – while also enabling them to work independently. The project will help the Laidlaw scholar develop skills in historical research, data analysis, project management, and digital and media literacy.  

• Influence of viscosity on the modulational instability problem of water waves

  Dr Josh Shelton
  Email: josh.shelton@st-andrews.ac.uk 

  The mathematical description of surface water waves (such as those observed on the ocean) is a free-boundary problem for the Navier-Stokes equations. Here, in addition to solving for the fluid velocity and pressure, the domain (the surface wave shape) also forms an unknown of the problem. Physically, these waves are initially generated from a flat wave state by surface shear stresses induced by wind. Their amplitude continues to grow over time, and nonlinearity can be further amplified due to the Benjamin-Feir (modulational) instability. The study of highly nonlinear waves is of interest due to the frequent damage of ships and platforms in the ocean caused by “rogue waves”. Unfortunately, minimal analytical progress can be made due to the mathematical difficulty of the formulation, and numerical approaches are also limited in application due to viscous boundary layers that emerge for small fluid viscosity.
  
  This project will investigate the stability of travelling wave solutions of the viscous problem by appealing to weakly-nonlinear theory, in which a single damped differential equation is obtained for the wave height. Progress will be made by combining methods in applied mathematics, such as those encountered in the study of differential equations, and also spectral numerical methods used to solve differential equations on periodic domains.

• Observational studies of high-mass star formation

  School of Physics and Astronomy

  Dr Claudia Cyganowski
  Email: cc243@st-andrews.ac.uk 

  One of the most exciting developments in the field of high-mass star formation in the last decade is the discovery of accretion bursts in massive young stellar objects (MYSOs), with the first two examples reported in 2017.  Since their discovery, the field has taken off, with more candidate burst sources identified via monitoring of methanol maser emission and a wealth of theoretical studies.  This project will involve working with observational data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) to analyse regions that have been identified as hosting candidate outbursts, with the aim of confirming and characterising additional accretion burst sources. 

• Reconstructing Earth’s past climates

  Dr Hana Jurikova, Earth & Environmental Sciences
  hj43@st-andrews.ac.uk
  Dr James Rae, Earth & Environmental Sciences
  jwbr@st-andrews.ac.uk

  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.

• Russia and the Victorians: Popular Imagination and Learning

  Dr Frances Nethercott, Modern History
  fn4@st-andrews.ac.uk

  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.

• Quantifying the bioavailability of porewater dissolved organic carbon in marine sediments.

  Dr Craig Smeaton
  Email: cs244@st-andrews.ac.uk 

  There is growing evidence that coastal sediments rich in organic matter are an important source of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) to the wider ocean. In the literature, there is a broad spectrum of opinions about the bioavailability of sediment-derived DOC, which simultaneously indicates that sediments are an important source of bio-refractory DOC to the water column, while others indicate that DOC released from sediments drives microbial respiration. In this project we seek to understand the bioavailability of the porewaters within the surficial layers of marine sediment. This will be achived through an accelerated incubation to better quantify the labile, sem-labile and refatory DOC pools with the aim to better understand the fate of this carbon when it reaches the wider ocean. The project will involve fieldwork and will have a large field component.    

• Space of Planar Graphs

  Dr Jeffrey Hicks
  Email: jeff.hicks@st-andrews.ac.uk 

  A planar graph is a network (a collection of vertices connected to edges) that can be drawn in the plane without any pair of edges crossing. We can form a “space of planar graphs” which encodes how planar graphs continuously deform into one another. In this project, we will study the topology of this space and prove that it is homotopy equivalent to the configuration space of disjoint points in the plane.

• Towards an Ecosystem for Innovation in Addiction Care: Mobilising Community-Based Solutions

  Business School (Interdisciplinary; Open to All Students)

  Dr Gosia Mitka
  Email: mmm25@st-andrews.ac.uk

  This project invites a Laidlaw Scholar to contribute to advancing innovation in addiction medicine by exploring valorisation pathways within the Scottish context. Scotland faces one of the highest rates of drug-related deaths in Europe, with addiction presenting a complex and persistent public health challenge. Despite significant research and policy efforts, the innovation ecosystem addressing addiction remains fragmented, with limited coordination between academic research, clinical practice, policy, and commercialisation. The student will undertake a mapping exercise to identify key actors, initiatives, and barriers within the Scottish addiction innovation landscape. This includes analysing how universities, healthcare providers, government agencies, and third-sector organisations interact—or fail to interact—in efforts to address addiction. The project will apply systems thinking and mission-oriented innovation principles to propose strategies for ecosystem-building, improved valorisation, and inclusive innovation. By identifying gaps and opportunities, the student will help lay the groundwork for a more integrated and impactful approach to addiction medicine innovation.

  The project has strong potential to evolve into a Leadership-in-Action (LiA) initiative focused on real-world implementation and stakeholder engagement in local community. The student will work directly with affected communities and individuals with lived experience, alongside service providers and local stakeholders, to translate research insights into practical (non-technological) interventions. This participatory approach (using design thinking) will ensure that innovation is grounded in real-world needs and contributes meaningfully to public value creation. Note: This research project may be implemented in the second summer as an LiA project but this is not a requirement. Potential LiA will be designed and discussed at a later stage to align with the evolving needs of the project and the student