A very warm welcome to Paige Karadag, who just joined the WITHIN study team as a Research Assistant on 4th Nov.

Fixed term contract for 12 months, 29.2 hours per week.

The University of Warwick is seeking to appoint a 12-month fixed term FTE 0.8 graduate Research Assistant (Project Co-ordinator) role at the Department of Psychology on a project investigating student mental health and resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 and associated social distancing measures have presented varying levels of stress and uncertainty to society worldwide. We know that the previous SARS epidemic in China led to significant and long-lasting psychosocial consequences. Within Warwick, discussions with subgroups of students staying on campus amid university closure have revealed a high level of anxiety and unease. It is unclear whether the levels of stress and uncertainty students experience is comparable to those normally associated with trauma, i.e., whether it can negatively affect important pillars of health (e.g., mood, sleep, physical activity), and whether it may aggravate psychiatric symptoms or extreme behaviour that warrant clinical attention. Our project will use survey and digital health technologies to investigate these questions.

The successful applicant will work as a team for the delivery of the project and the dissemination of the findings. This will include setting up, advertising and running the surveys, collecting and analysing data and writing the work up for, pre-registrations, publications and presentations, liaising with other student representatives, stakeholders, and academic, clinical and commercial partners of the project, as well as wider members of the Warwick Sleep and Pain Lab and the Warwick University Mental Health Research Centre.

We are looking for candidates with research experience in health settings, as well as great people, organisational and project management skills.

Please send informal queries to Dr Nicole Tang n.tang@warwick.ac.uk. Closing date: 26th May 2020.

Laura Chandler has joined our team as a PhD student, studying sleep and mental health in workplace and university settings. Her other supervisors are Prof Caroline Meyer and Dr Lukasz Walasek. Her PhD studentship is funded by the EPSRC and she'll be based at the WMG and hotdesking in H1.44.

Dr Kristy Themelis and Ms Jenna Gillett are Research Fellow and Research Assistant on our new MRC-funded WITHIN project (Warwick Study of Mental Defeat in Chronic Pain). We are very pleased to have them join our growing research team.

Kristy used to work as a physiotherapist in the Netherlands, before moving to the UK to complete an MSc in Pain; Science and Society at King’s College London. She completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Nottingham in 2017 and subsequently worked as a Research fellow in the Department of Neuroscience in the Brighton and Sussex Medical School exploring mechanisms of chronic pain and fatigue. See here for more information about her research interests.

Jenna studied at the University of Buckingham, completing a 2-year intense Batchelor’s degree and Stage 1 Health Psychology Master’s. During her Master’s degree she completed a 6-month placement at the National Spinal Injuries Centre working with patients and helping evaluate current rehabilitation programmes. See here for more information about her research interests.