Pre-defined projects 2026
You must discuss how you would approach these projects with the respective project sponsor and they must complete the Laidlaw Supervisor reference form to indicate that they support your application - laidlaw-supervisor-reference-form (Word).
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School of History
Dr Bernhard Struck
Email: bs50@st-andrews.ac.ukIn the early 1900s, the constructed language Esperanto spread rapidly across Europe and part of the globe around 1900. It was picked up in capitals but also in more peripheral places from the east coast of Scotland to Bulgaria or rural Finland. The new language attracted scientists, merchants, doctors, and indeed many women.
Esperanto clubs, societies and journals mushroomed across and beyond Europe after 1900. The first international congress was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer in France in 1905 and, with brief interruptions during both World Wars, congresses are still held today.
Before 1914 numbers of Esperanto speakers are estimated at around half a million before the language movement reached a quantitative peak in the 1920s. The language is active and alive in particular among a younger generation that flocks to new social forms of interaction and social media.
One of the many fascinating aspects of Esperanto and the language movement is the staggering variety of sources and objects it has produced. These range from letters, postcards, journals, annual year books, congress books, travel guides, photographs, posters, to literature, pins or t-shirts. How can we tell a history of Esperanto past and present through selected material objects? This is the guiding question that this Laidlaw project proposes to ask.
This project will zoom into a select sample of sources and objects to tell the history of Esperanto - yet not along a more established timeline from then to now. But from different places, different moments in time, and through this fascinating and often scattered sources and material objects. The project will be based around the research project on “Esperanto and Internationalism, ca.1880s-1930” based at the Institute for Transnational and Spatial History.
With a focus on primary sources in various shape and form, it is the goal to identify objects and produce brief scripts and a sequence of shorter videos that explain these objects to a wider audience. The scholar will have access to resources of the group and will get an insight into collaborative research including outreach and producing media content. The scholar will be working along the lines of transnational and global history, a major and booming field over the past years. Ideally, this would be a two-year project.
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School of Art History
Dr Shona Kellestrup
Email: sk61@st-andrews.ac.ukThe starting point for this project is a private UK collection of 13 watercolours painted in December 1917 by the Austrian war artist Josef Heu (1876–1952). Documenting the destruction of oil and coal sites across Romania, these sketches capture desolate scenes of collapsed pylons, trailing wires and the mangled machinery of energy infrastructure. The watercolours originally belonged to Heu’s friend, the Viennese physician Stefan Jellinek (1871–1968). A pioneer of electrotherapy and electropathology, Jellinek employed the artist Erwin Osen to document the effects of electrical currents on soldiers with ‘war neuroses’ in 1915. Both Heu’s war paintings and Osen’s portraits came to light following the sale of Jellenik’s archive in Edinburgh.
Heu and Jellenik came to Britain to escape Nazism. Jellenik spent his later years in Edinburgh and probably facilitated Heu’s portrait bust commissions for the Royal College of Surgeons there. Both men’s interest in art and electricity, as well as their interventions in the fields of medicine and education in Britain, are deserving of more research. Drawing on special access to Heu’s recently rediscovered watercolours, this project will combine close analysis of his wartime scenes with research into the ‘electric bodies’ documented by Jellinek. It will widen understanding of how these two important figures used art to engage with electricity during the First World War, whether as a focus of mechanised destruction or as an experimental healing force. As part of the research process, there is the potential for the student to travel to Vienna to examine first-hand how artists such as Osen and Egon Schiele intepretted the war-damaged body. -
Business School - Management
Dr Xi Xi
Email: xx27@st-andrews.ac.ukAs 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. -
Business School - Economics
Dr Irina Merkurieva
Email: im58@st-andrews.ac.ukThe 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. -
Business School - Economics
Prof Ian Smith
Email: is@st-andrews.ac.ukThis 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.
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School of Classics
Dr Alice König
Email: arw6@st-andrews.ac.ukFor 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
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Business School - Economics
Dr Luc Bridet
Email: lb222@st-andrews.ac.ukExam 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).
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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. -
School of Geography and Sustainable Development
Dr Tim Stojanovic
Email: tas21@st-andrews.ac.ukThis project provides an opportunity to be involved in a Delphi study investigating the views of ~70 national and international experts on the topic of developing performance indicators for Marine Protected Areas. Working with myself and my team of PhD students, the scholar will have the opportunity to contribute to phases of data collection, data analysis and workshop facilitation, and understand the network of professional practitioners who are active in implementing this vital and expanding field of marine conservation. Basic familiarity with social science research methods would be an advantage.
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Schools of Chemistry, Biology, and Modern Languages
Dr John Mitchell
Email: jbom@st-andrews.ac.ukDr V Anne Smith
Email: vas1@st-andrews.ac.ukDr Emily Finer
Email: ef50@st-andrews.ac.ukArtificial intelligence (AI) has become part of modern culture, recently accelerating due to the success and visibility of generative AI such as ChatGTP and DALL-E. However, AI is much broader, from household Alexas and navigation systems to smart healthcare applications. AI has also been ubiquitous in science fiction (SF), both the everyday applications such as navigation and planning, but also often as robots, computers or holograms sentient or semi-sentient in their own right. SF can present utopian or dystopian views of AI, from Star Trek’s Data to the murderous HAL of 2001. How do SF depictions of AI impact modern views of AI? This project will explore this question, considering exposure to literary and/or cinematic examples of AI and the resulting impact on attitudes towards current AI.
The project will initially focus both on writing a brief review of the relevant literature and also on obtaining relevant data. The latter may involve the design of surveys or other crowdsourcing mechanisms to probe both exposure to SF and our views on questions concerning AI – are we hopeful that AI will solve humanity’s problems, or fearful that it will destroy us; do we worry that it might cost jobs or cause environmental harm; do we trust what AI tells us; do we believe that AI could, has, or will become conscious? If the project progresses well, we hope that the student would be in a position to obtain and organise the data and to use machine learning and statistical methods for their analysis.
Supervisor Research Interests:
- Dr Mitchell: computational chemistry, machine learning, AI in chemistry education and research, https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/chemistry/people/jbom/
- Dr Smith: computational biology, networks, science fiction, https://vannesmithlab.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/
- Dr Finer: digital humanities, science communication, transnational and multilingual cultural dynamics, https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/modern-languages/people/russian/ef50
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School of Mathematics and Statistics
Dr Josh Shelton
Email: josh.shelton@st-andrews.ac.ukThe 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. -
School of Physics and Astronomy
Dr Claudia Cyganowski
Email: cc243@st-andrews.ac.ukOne 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.
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Geography and Sustainable Development
Dr Craig Smeaton
Email: cs244@st-andrews.ac.ukThere 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 achieved through an accelerated incubation to better quantify the labile, semi-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 for a few days on the west coast of Scotland.
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Earth and Environmental Sciences
Dr Hana Jurikova
Email: hj43@st-andrews.ac.ukDr James Rae
Email: jwbr@st-andrews.ac.ukDuring 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.
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Modern History
Dr Frances Nethercott
Email: fn4@st-andrews.ac.ukAnglo-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, constituted the timid beginnings of a scholarly practice or tradition, while a small number of contemporary novelists like 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 in the 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.
This project, then, offers several lines of enquiry:
- the establishment of a ‘Russian corpus’
- Victorian learning practices
- the role of Russian emigres as conduits of knowledge and or ‘opinion makers.’
Dr Frances hopes the project will be of interest to students of History, English and or Russian.
The proposal has some potential for research leadership experience: organisation of a workshop with invited speakers specialising in any of the themes mentioned; interdisciplinary initiatives.
This project examines the digital activity of museum and heritage institutions in relation to the climate crisis. Digital technologies are often purported as one of the solutions to the climate crisis, however, intersectional analysis reveals issues such as techno- and digital colonialism, a persistent digital divide and unsustainable extractive practices that disproportionately negatively affect the Minority World. Through guided research, analysing existing survey data, and conducting interviews with museum and heritage professionals globally, the successful student will analyse current understandings of the environmental cost of digital activity in the museums and heritage sector and set out recommendations for future activity.
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School of Mathematics and Mathematical Stastics
Dr Jeffrey Hicks
Email: jeff.hicks@st-andrews.ac.ukA 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.
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School of History
Professor Aileen Fyfe
Email: akf@st-andrews.ac.ukThe Franco-Scottish Society was established in 1895, with a branch in each of the two countries. Its founders were prominent French and Scottish intellectuals and statesmen who hoped to further friendly relations between the two countries, and to support reciprocal exchanges of students. One of those involved in the early meetings later claimed that they were a ‘dry run for the Entente Cordiale’ (Nobel Peace Prize nominee Thomas Barclay). The Society carries on its work in a rather different form today, but maintains its founding principles, especially its firm commitment to education.
There currently is no modern history of the Society’s foundation and development, or assessment of its longer-term significance. This student project is proposed in collaboration with the Society, whose officers would like to have a short popular history that could potentially be used as a pamphlet or on the Society website; the Society may invite the student to present their findings in person. As well as the published Transactions, there are substantial holdings of relevant papers in the National Library of Scotland, some of which were recently used to create a small temporary exhibition.
This project would be ideal for a 2nd or 3rd-year student studying French and Modern History, but would be equally suitable for a Modern History student with a good level of reading skills in French. -
Business School (Interdisciplinary; Open to All Students)
Dr Gosia Mitka
Email: mmm25@st-andrews.ac.ukThis 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.