Join our vibrant and supportive PhD community.
Studying for a PhD is a highly rewarding and challenging process.
As part of a research community and with individual supervision you will become a leading expert in your area.
All of our academic staff are active researchers, who are at the cutting edge of their research field. We have an outstanding reputation for research in our specialist areas.
You are encouraged to explore our research communities and contact the academic whose interests match your own.
Our research is divided into four themes. Each research community is led by staff who are at the forefront of their fields.
How do we develop an understanding of the world around us? We look at cognitive, social, emotional and language development from before birth through to adolescence.
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What are the fundamental cognitive processes behind language, learning, memory, and attention? How does our understanding of cognition impact society?
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How does the brain respond to different environments and govern cognitive function? We research how humans understand and process the world around us.
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How do we develop definitions of morality or trust, and how do they affect our emotions in social interaction or decision making?
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Each year the Psychology Department offers several fully-funded PhD studentships (commencing the following October), as well as opportunities to apply for other studentships via the ESRC's North West Social Sciences Doctoral Training Partnership (NWSSDTP).
In all cases, we are looking for academically excellent students, who are passionate about doing research and have an exciting project they want to pursue.
For more information on funding, see the Funding Opportunities section.
For more information on the application process, please visit our Current Opportunities page.
To begin the process, you will need to find a PhD Supervisor whose research interests align with your own. You will need to contact them to discuss your application.
To begin the process, you will need to find a PhD supervisor whose research interests align with your own. You will need to contact them to discuss your application and the development of your research proposal. To help with this process, we advertise ‘project ideas’ staff have proposed as starting points for the development of a research proposal. The project ideas are organised by research community (although many fall into more than one research community). Please read the advertised project ideas and additional information and contact the main supervisor to discuss the development of your research proposal. If you have an idea for a project that is not listed here, but which falls within the research area of a member of our staff, most staff are happy to be contacted about that. Just send them an email outlining your idea. You can find out about our staff's research interests by visiting our People pages.
Please contact your proposed supervisor as early as possible as developing your research proposal will take time.
To apply, create an account on the Applying for postgraduate study website.
Here you can submit applications for the programme(s) which you wish to study, upload supporting documentation and provide us with information about referees. You may apply for all our postgraduate programmes using this method.
If you are a current Lancaster student or have recently graduated from Lancaster, we can reduce the amount of information that you will need to provide. You will need to offer only one reference and will not need to supply your Lancaster degree transcript. We will also pre-fill your details, ready for you to check.
If you use the Postgraduate Applications website, then you will be advised which documentation you need to upload or send to us. We can automatically contact your referees once you have submitted your application if you ask us to.
The supporting documentation screen will provide you with a list of required documents. These will usually include:
Most of our funded PhD studentships are advertised in November and December prior to a start date in October the following year. To be considered for these studentships, please make sure to apply by mid-January/early February (see for exact application deadlines under ‘Current opportunities’). Some funded opportunities will be advertised separately, at varying times of the year. These are usually associated with a grant awarded to a member of staff and advertise a PhD position to work on that particular grant. These will be advertised under ‘Other funding opportunities’ as and when they come up. If you are pursuing a self-funded application, we strongly encourage you to aim for an October start date and apply at least 6 months before. An October start date allows you to make the best use of Department, Faculty and College induction programmes and will make sure you settle in as quickly as possible. Under exceptional circumstances, we will consider an alternative start date. Please contact the postgraduate.psychology@lancaster.ac.uk for further guidance if you have questions about this.
Each year, the Department offers several PhD studentships, as well as opportunities to support applications for studentships via the ESRC’s North West Social Sciences Doctoral Training Partnership (NWSSDTP).
Studentships typically provide funding for 3 or 3.5 years and cover fees, a maintenance stipend and access to a Research Training and Support Grant. Additionally, all new PhD students receive a laptop with a monitor and workstation.
Some studentships cover fees for applicants with a ‘Home’ fee status only, while other studentships cover fees for applicants with a ‘Home’ or an ‘International’ fee status.
More information on how the University determines an applicants’ fee status can be found on our Fee Status pages.
The Department supports applications for studentships via the Economic and Social Research Council’s North West Social Sciences Doctoral Training Partnership (NWSSDTP), which include standard studentships and CASE studentships (for collaboration with a non-higher education partner). NWSSDTP studentships are open to both applicants with a ‘Home’ fees or an ‘International’ fee status. However, across the DTP, no more than 30% of studentships can be allocated to applicants with an ‘International’ fee status. Within the NWSSDTP, applicants can apply for funding for a master's degree in combination with doctoral studies (1+3) or for funding to support their doctoral studies (+3). The NWSSDTP currently supports several studentships ring-fenced for students from a Global Majority background. The ESRC has also awarded the NWSSDTP a number of ‘steered’ studentships in the ‘priority areas’ of advanced quantitative methods, longitudinal studies (using ESRC datasets) and interdisciplinary work. Please visit our ‘Current Opportunities’ for information on how to apply via our Department.
Please see under ‘Current Opportunities’ for information on the application process.
Decoding Ruminative Inner Speech with Multimodal Brain-and-Articulatory Machine Learning
Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD studentship in the Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, hosted by the Data Science and AI Institute (DSAIL) and funded by an EPSRC Doctoral Landscape Award. The project develops a wearable, AI-driven brain-computer interface that detects spontaneous inner speech - the silent verbal stream involved in self-talk, rumination, and intrusive thought - and classifies its emotional content from a combination of brain activity (EEG) and tongue movement (ultrasound tongue imaging).
Supervisory team: Dr Bo Yao (Psychology, Lancaster), Professor Hossein Rahmani (Computing and Communications, Lancaster), Dr Sam Kirkham (Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster).
PhD project description: Inner speech is functionally involved in memory, planning, and self-regulation. It also manifests as verbal rumination, a feature of depression and anxiety, and is implicated in voice-hearing experiences in psychosis. Existing approaches mostly use silent-speech paradigms in which inner speech is produced on cue, but ruminative and intrusive thoughts arise spontaneously, so capturing them requires methods that work in naturalistic conditions.
This PhD will develop such methods, combining wearable EEG with portable ultrasound imaging of the tongue. The student will work at the intersection of cognitive/computational neuroscience, machine learning, and articulatory phonetics. They will translate an existing inner-speech classifier from research-grade laboratory EEG to a wearable form factor, and develop deep-learning models that identify spontaneous inner-speech episodes and characterise their emotional valence. The project will also establish what is achievable with wearable EEG alone, a critical step towards future clinical applications.
The student will be based in the Language, Inner Speech, and Neuroscience (LISN) Lab within the Department of Psychology, and embedded in the Imaging and Computer Vision Lancaster (iCVL) group (Computing) and the Phonetics Lab (Linguistics). They will be part of the DSAIL doctoral cohort, which brings together AI and data-science PhD students from across the university, with its own training programme, annual research events, and computational resources including Lancaster’s High-End Computing (HEC) GPU cluster. The Department of Psychology holds an Athena Swan Silver Award and supports an active research culture of seminars, writing workshops, and PhD-led activities.
Training and skills: Supervision is interdisciplinary, spanning cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, and articulatory phonetics. The student will develop hands-on skills in experimental design for EEG, ultrasound, and behavioural data collection; deep-learning model development; multimodal signal processing and fusion; articulatory speech analysis; and reproducible research practice with open-source software release. Outputs from the project will span cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, and phonetics venues.
Application details: The successful candidate will hold, or expect to obtain, at least an upper-second-class honours degree, and ideally a Masters, in computational neuroscience, computer science, or a closely related quantitative discipline. Strong Python programming skills and demonstrable machine-learning experience are essential. Applicants should complement this technical expertise with familiarity with neuroscientific or psychological experimental design - for example, in language, cognition, or inner speech research. Prior experience in signal processing, deep learning, and/or EEG and neuroimaging analysis is highly desirable.
Funding details: This 3.5-year full-time studentship is open to UK home students. It covers UK home fees, a tax-free stipend at the UKRI minimum rate for 2026/27 (£21,805 p.a.), paid subject to satisfactory progress, and a Research Training Support Grant (RTSG) of £1,000 per year for research-related expenses, conferences, and training. Additional cohort training and computational resources are provided through DSAIL.
How to apply (note there are 2 elements to the process): Please apply though the official University process. Instructions for applying through the University can be found at the Lancaster University Admission Portal. Please also submit your application materials via this Qualtrics form, which is specific to this PhD opportunity.
The materials required are:
Dates
Informal enquiries: Prospective applicants are warmly encouraged to get in touch before applying. Please contact Dr Bo Yao (b.yao1@lancaster.ac.uk) for informal enquiries about the project, the supervisory team, or the application process.
The Department of Psychology at Lancaster University usually has one or more studentships funded by the Faculty of Science and Technology available. The award is for PhD funding (+3) and provides tuition fees at the ‘Home/UK’ rate, a maintenance stipend in accordance with UKRI rates, and access to a grant towards research training support. Applicants with an ‘International’ fee status must fund the difference between Home/UK and International fees themselves, if successful. As a department, we particularly encourage applications to work with early career staff. This year these include: Dr Carly Anderson, Dr Abigail Fiske, Dr Alice Milne, Dr Alice Rees, and Dr Heather Shaw. Applications to work with these members of staff are weighted preferentially at the short-listing stage for this studentship. Please see under ‘Current Opportunities’ for information on the application process.
Please see under ‘Current Opportunities’ for information on the application process.
Other opportunities will be posted here when available.
The Department of Psychology is happy to support applications to the Lancaster University-China Scholarship Council Joint Scholarship. Please see under ‘Current Opportunities’ for information on the application process.
