Pre-defined projects 2027
Note: Pre-defined research projects for the 2027-28 application period are still being confirmed. This is a rolling list, and projects will continue to be added below up until applications open on 2 November 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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Centre for Biological Diversity, School of Biology
Dr Natalie Pilakouta
Email: np84@st-andrews.ac.ukGlobal climate change is the greatest threat to biodiversity in the 21st century, and studies examining the effects of temperature on organisms have been rapidly accumulating. Yet, many fundamental questions remain unanswered.
For example, although climate change has resulted in both higher mean temperatures and an increase in temperature variability, prior studies have focused on the former, testing the effects of low versus high constant temperatures on organisms. We lack information on how variable temperatures—and changes in this variability—will affect animal survival and reproduction.
Given the ubiquity of simplified experimental designs that abstract away from the complexity of what natural populations experience, the current scientific literature may therefore be underestimating the true effects of climate change. This experiment will use more realistic, fluctuating temperature regimes to examine effects on parental care, reproductive success, and offspring fitness in an insect model system (the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides).
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Business School - Management
Dr Xi Xi
Email: xx27@st-andrews.ac.ukAs artificial intelligence increasingly shapes modern workplaces, employees may use AI to write, communicate, make decisions and interact with colleagues and customers. It raises questions about whether their work still feels genuinely their own, how they present themselves to others, and what it means to be authentic at work.
The aim of the project is to explore how the use of AI in the workplace shape employees' experiences of authenticity at work. The scholar will conduct a systematic literature review of academic journal articles and grey literature.
The project will develop the scholar's skills in systematic reviewing, qualitative analysis and critical synthesis while contributing to the understanding an emerging aspect of AI and the changing nature of work.
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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 Physics and Astronomy
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 millimeter continuum sources that have been identified as new massive young stellar object outburst candidates, with the aim of characterising the nature and physical properties of these sources. The project will involve the analysis of ALMA line and continuum images. -
Modern Languages - Chinese Studies
Professor Hongwei Bao
Email: hb270@st-andrews.ac.ukThis project is designed to create an up-to-date chronology and bibliography of Chinese queer history, documenting key historical events pertaining to LGBTQIA+ lives in China from the 1980s to present. The compiled chronology and bibliography will have the opportunity of being published online, collected by relevant LGBTQIA+ Archives, and used for classroom teaching. The selected Laidlaw Scholar will work closely with Professor Hongwei Bao, a Chinese queer studies scholar. The candidate is expected to have an upper intermediate to advanced level of reading Chinese, and is able to conduct library and online research independently. Skills such as writing, summarising, synthesising, analysis and presentation are also essential to the project.
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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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French / Modern Languages
Prof. Mary Orr
Email: mmo@st-andrews.ac.ukWomen’s educational opportunities and scientific-cultural participations have always been harder won. Rather than uphold the narrative of the ‘leaky pipeline’ for their secondary, side-lined, token endeavours, this project encourages the positive rethink of how extraordinary 19th-century women defying all the odds against their work succeeded nonetheless.
With renewed attention to the importance of their ‘interdisciplinarity’, ’intercultural literacies’, ‘local’ knowledges on the one hand, and their mentors, life opportunities, and risk-taking mindsets on the other hand, the project investigates how new affirmative models rediscovered in the past can inform and address 21st-century ‘shortages’ not only of ‘suitable women leaders’ in scientific and cultural production, but also of change-making women differently doing ‘how things are always done.’ By adding one new name, the project investigates women’s ‘differently’ rather than ‘difference’, to leverage what transforms obstacles to their path into strategic gains.
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School of Geography and Sustainable Development
Hon Chim Chiu
Email: hcc6@st-andrews.ac.ukLuthrie, in Creich, North Fife, experienced three flooding events with the latest in 2023. A variety of flood resilience measures has since been in place, including desiliting of the Windygates Burn, a local stream that runs through the village. Plans to slow the river flow into the Burn through the use of, for example, leaky dams are in discussion, however putting in place these intervntions requires planning and discussion at the local level, so that impacts to landowners and the agricultural practices are minimised.
The scholar will work together with the Luthrie Resilience Group, of Creich and Flisk Community Council, to examine the viable approaches to flood resilience. The scholar will first identify resources, data, and information that is required for such approaches to be implemented. Field work will then be carried out to survey, measure, identify physical features in the field, as well as collecting information about local perception to flood resilience.
Analysis of the results will focus on how potential flood resilient measures could impact land use and farming practices, and the research outcome will be used by the Group to inform their next course of action. -
School of Classics
Carlos Machado
Email: carm3@st-andrews.ac.ukThis project will use Bioarchaeology as a way of understanding how the society of Roman Italy changed between the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages (c. 200-800 CE). The project will survey and catalogue the available (published) information about nutrition, health conditions, and diseases provided by the analysis of skeletons and biological material from late antique Italy. Based on this, the research will devise a specific question and produce a report analyzing a key aspect of the transformation of living standards that marked the final centuries of the Roman empire.
There is potential for adopting a comparative approach that examines poverty issues in contemporary British society.
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Schools of Chemistry and Biology
Dr John Mitchell
Email: jbom@st-andrews.ac.ukDr V Anne Smith
Email: vas1@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, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and DALL-E. However, AI is much broader, from household Alexas, robots and navigation systems to smart healthcare applications to grammar checkers and autocorrects. 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://jbomgroup.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/research/
- Dr Smith: computational biology, networks, science fiction, https://vannesmithlab.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/
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School of Geography and Sustainable Development
Dr Tim Stojanovic
Email: tas21@st-andrews.ac.ukThis project provides an opportunity to be involved in reviewing 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 and data analysis. They will get to know a network of professional practitioners who are active in implementing this vital and expanding field of marine conservation. Candidates should have some background knowledge about marine protected areas. Basic familiarity with social science research methods would be an advantage.
Further information - https://mace.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/
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School of Biology
Sonja Vernes and Kirsty Hamilton
Email: scv1@st-andrews.ac.uk, kah28@st-andrews.ac.ukVocal learning, the ability to produce modified vocalizations as a result of learning from acoustic signals, is a key trait in the evolution of speech. While extensively studied in songbirds, mammalian models for vocal learning are rare. Bats present a promising study system given their gregarious natures, small size, and maintenance in captive colonies.
We have developed methods to directly manipulate gene expression in the living bat brain to investigate the consequences on molecular mechanisms, neural responses, and behaviour underlying vocal learning traits. For example, we have generated transgenic bats with FoxP2 gene manipulation, a key factor implicated in human speech and mutated in Childhood Apraxia of Speech, to understand how FoxP2 contributes to the biology and evolution of vocal learning. This project utilises a captive colony of Pale Spear-nosed Bats (Phyllostomus discolor).
Depending on the interests and expertise of the applicant, this project will use a range of techniques including tissue culture, cellular assays, immunohistochemistry, fluorescence imaging, behavioural video analysis, neural circuit tracing, and image analysis. The project aims to further interrogate the molecular, neural, and behavioural outcomes of vocal learning-related gene manipulations in the living bat brain.
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School of Biology
Dr Michael M Nevels
Email: mmn3@st-andrews.ac.ukMost of us are infected with the human cytomegalovirus (HCMV). We carry the virus for life in a 'latent' state in blood and bone marrow stem cells. HCMV reactivation from latency is a leading cause of birth defects and multi-organ disease in immunosuppressed patients, affecting millions of people each year. There is currently no vaccine for HCMV. Antiviral drugs used for prophylaxis are toxic, have carcinogenic and teratogenic potential, do not target latent virus and have similar mechanisms of action, resulting in cross-resistance to multiple drugs.
There is a need for safer drugs with novel mechanisms of action that target HCMV as it reactivates from latency. We have identified drug-like small molecules that inhibit HCMV replication through a novel mechanism of action. Unlike existing drugs that target late infection events including viral DNA replication and packaging, our compounds specifically interfere with transcription from the HCMV major immediate-early (IE) promoter, which drives viral IE gene expression and reactivation from latency. Two of the compounds are more potent and less toxic than ganciclovir, the current 'gold standard' in HCMV therapy, and are effective against viral strains resistant to existing drugs.
To further improve the potency of the compounds and make them patentable, we have used medicinal chemistry to design chemically modified derivatives of the original hit compounds. This project will compare the modified compounds with the original ones for potency and lack of toxicity in primary cell models of HCMV infection and reactivation to assess their potential for ex vivo clinical use.
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Earth and Environmental Sciences
Dr 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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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 Medicine
Alex Gardner
Email: adg23@st-andrews.ac.ukThe negative health effects experienced by children exposed to second hand smoke are well documented for certain outcomes such as asthma and other respiratory conditions. Unfortunately, less is known about risks specifically affecting the oral health of children exposed to second-hand smoke. Similarly, less is known about equivalent risks of second hand exposure to nicotine vapour from alternative nicotine delivery systems (e.g. vaping and heated tobacco products).
This may in part be due to the relative novelty of habits such as vaping. This project will involve conducting a systematic review of the current literature relating to paediatric oral health problems documented in children exposed to second hand smoke and/or second hand vapour. It is hoped that by clarifying the current level of understanding on these topics that avenues for future research related to this subject could be identified.
The work is an expansion of a collaboration between University of St. Andrews and University of Padua, Italy. There will be additional supervisory input from both institutions. This project would suit those with an interest in public health, oral health, and reducing harms from smoking and vaping. Those looking to develop skills in conducting systematic reviews would also benefit and no prior experience is necessary.