PhD Studentship: Simulating Person-specific Cognitive Processes from Expressive Behaviours for Mental Health Assessment (Funded)

About the role

The University of Exeter’s Department of Computer Science invites applications for a funded PhD studentship to commence on 21 September 2026, or as soon as possible thereafter. For eligible students, the studentship will cover Home or International tuition fees plus an annual tax-free stipend of at least £21,805 for 3.5 years full-time, or pro rata for part-time study.

Responsibilities

• Develop multimodal models from facial expressions, speech, head movement, gaze and interaction dynamics.
• Encode simulated cognition using graph- and transformer-based methods.
• Train and evaluate models on publicly available and ethically collected clinical or sub-clinical datasets.
• Investigate fairness, privacy, uncertainty estimation and explainability so that predictions are reliable and used as decision-support rather than automated diagnosis.

Requirements

Candidates should have a background in computer science, AI, machine learning, affective computing, computational psychology or related areas. Strong programming skills are essential.

Qualifications

The successful candidate will be expected to hold a relevant Honours degree (or equivalent) at a high level, with a strong academic record in computer science, AI, machine learning, affective computing, computational psychology or related areas.

Skills

Strong programming skills are essential. Experience with deep learning, affective computing, multimodal signal processing, graph neural networks, hypernetworks, temporal modelling and responsible AI is desirable.

Benefits

The studentship covers Home or International tuition fees plus an annual tax-free stipend of at least the UKRI minimum stipend.

Pay

The stipend is £21,805 per annum.

Schedule

The studentship is funded for 3.5 years full-time, or pro rata for part-time study.