School of Health and Wellbeing
Self-Funded PhD Opportunities

Our mission is to prevent disease, improve health & wellbeing, and reduce inequalities: locally, nationally and globally through our inter-disciplinary programme of world-leading research and excellent research-led teaching. Established in 2012, we are an inter-disciplinary institute that bridges the College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences and the College of Social Sciences.

Self-Funded PhD Opportunties

Developing a risk stratification tool to detect ADHD in children and adolescents
ADHD is associated with adverse impacts on health, education, and employment however there are currently delays, of sometimes years, before it is diagnosed and therefore managed, causing preventable distress to the child, family, and teachers as well as lasting psychological, educational, and social disadvantage. We hypothesize that development of a risk stratification tool will enable ADHD to be detected and managed earlier; thereby reducing the adverse impact on affected children and their families. The student will undergo training (via courses and self-learning) in the following: Safe researcher training, R programming, statistical methods, data linkage methods, analysing ‘big’ data, machine learning techniques, additional statistical programming packages (if needed) such as SPSS, Stata, SAS and python.

Adverse health, neurodevelopmental and educational outcomes in offspring following in utero exposure to maternal medication
Pregnancy is a vulnerable period when the foetus undergoes rapid development; therefore, exposure to adverse risk factors can have lifelong implications. Use of medicines during pregnancy is avoided where possible but is sometimes unavoidable. Whilst acute adverse effects following foetal exposure in utero have been assessed for several medicines, possible longer-term effects, specifically offspring neurodevelopmental delay and educational outcomes, are not well understood. Scotland and Wales are both world leading in having comprehensive countrywide health and education data which can be linked at an individual level enabling novel research to answer such questions. We hypothesise that some medications taken during pregnancy will be associated with poor child health, child neurodevelopmental and child educational outcomes.

Developing a risk stratification tool to detect neurodevelopmental multimorbidity in children and adolescents
Research including our own show that children with single and multiple neurodevelopmental disorders exhibit poorer health, education, and employment outcomes 1 however current delays, of sometimes years, before neurodevelopmental conditions are diagnosed and managed cause preventable distress to the child, family, and teachers and lasting educational and social disadvantage. We hypothesise that developing a risk stratification tool will enable neurodevelopmental multimorbidity to be detected and managed earlier; thereby reducing adversity on affected children and their families. We aim to link Scotland-wide health and education data together and develop and validate a tool to predict neurodevelopmental multimorbidity in children and adolescents that can be used clinically to support earlier detection, and hence earlier interventions and support. We will undertake individual-level record linkage of several Scotland-wide education and health databases.
The student will undergo training (via courses and self-learning) in the following: Safe researcher training, R programming, statistical methods, data linkage methods, analysing ‘big’ data, machine learning techniques, additional statistical programming packages (if needed) such as SPSS, Stata, SAS and python.