Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Programme for Interdisciplinary Resilience Studies

Apply

Two routes

We will conduct an annual call for studentship proposals. Proposals can be submitted either by supervisory teams (two to three academic staff from different Schools), to which prospective students then apply, or by prospective students themselves.

The details

When applying, please submit your application documents to the programme associated with your chosen project. The application link for each programme can be found within the project description.

The following interdisciplinary projects have been proposed by supervisory teams from across the University:

This PhD explores how people with multiple long-term conditions (MLTCs) access and experience nature to support wellbeing. Using mixed methods, it investigates barriers, lived experiences, and the role of different natural spaces. Findings will inform strategies to enhance equitable, sustainable nature-based wellbeing interventions for disadvantaged populations.

Full description: Investigating resilience in nature connectedness and wellbeing in chronic illness, using mixed-methods 

This interdisciplinary PhD examines how migrant entrepreneurs contribute to the resilience of British urban high streets during crises, such as COVID-19, economic hardship, and changes in immigration policy. Using ethnography and participatory methods, it explores their impact on local communities, with a possible focus on Southampton and other coastal areas.

Full description: Resilient urban high-streets: the nature and survival of migrant businesses in hostile Britain

Drawing on an interdisciplinary resilience perspective, this project uses biographical interviews, discourse analysis and social network mapping to understand elasticity and brittleness in social networks of gay men and how, underpinned by a shift to online communities, networks of older gay men have changed over time with implications for wellbeing.

Full description: Exploring online communities, resilience and wellbeing among older gay men

This project explores how schools and families shape migrant children’s academic resilience in the UK. Using participatory and sensory methods, it amplifies children’s voices to surface links between inclusion and embodied resilience. Findings aim to inform school and family practices and foster collaborative, inclusive environments that support migrant pupils’ resilience.

Full description: Embodying Academic Resilience in Migrant Childhoods through Student Voice

Explore how private gardens can facilitate climate resilience. Taking a mixed-methods approach – combining spatial modelling, interviews and participatory methods – this project investigates how climate change, socio-demographic factors, and people’s willingness or resistance to change will shape the fundamental capacity of gardens to act as a cornerstone of urban climate resilience.

Full description: Climate robust gardening for future urban resilience

This project investigates how civilians in Ukraine exposed to landmines, or living amid suspected contamination, adapt and maintain wellbeing under prolonged risk. Using mixed-methods research, it explores factors that promote or hinder resilience, coping strategies, and social cohesion, providing insights to inform civilian protection, risk education, and humanitarian response in conflict-affected settings.

Full description: Resilience and Adaptation among Civilians Living in Landmine-Contaminated Areas in Ukraine

This PhD aims to understand how people living with long-term health conditions (LTCs) can better build resilience to climate change. Working with vulnerable communities the researcher will use individual narratives and real-time momentary analysis to establish how LTCs impact adaptive capabilities during weather extremes.

Full description: Developing climate change resilience for multiple long-term health conditions: co-creating policy recommendations

This PhD explores how shared mobility systems, such as car clubs, e-bikes, and platform-based services, can support communities during crises like floods, storms, or transport shutdowns. Combining optimisation, behavioural science, and governance, the research will design fair, trusted, and practical ways to use shared transport for emergency and resilience planning.

Full description: Adaptive shared mobility for systemic resilience: Trust, fairness, and decision-making under disruption

This PhD investigates how Ethiopia and Kenya’s khat economies adapted after the UK ban, combining Earth observation, AI, and economic modelling to assess resilience in livelihoods, land use, and ecosystems. Using satellite data and socio-economic analysis, it reveals how global drug policies reshape rural development, sustainability, and agricultural transitions.

Full description: Tracking the Global Story of Khat: From Banned Stimulant to Hidden Economy

We wish to recruit a PhD student who is keen to learn an inter-disciplinary approach to their research. Our project proposes investigations around markers of resilience, and access to healthcare, in rural Ghana, West Africa.

Full description: Understand household resilience and access to healthcare in the face of climate change: a mixed-methods approach to reducing vulnerabilities in rural Ghana

This interdisciplinary PhD explores how victimhood identities drive or prevent radicalisation, extremism, hate speech, and polarisation in Europe. Combining political psychology, criminology, and digital media analysis, this project investigates emotional and informational mechanisms across online communities to understand victimhood identities, grievance, resilience, and how societies can resist radicalising and polarisation narratives in digital spaces.

Full description: Victimhood Identities and Radicalisation Pathways: Psychological and Informational Drivers of Extremism, Hate Speech, and Polarisation in Europe

This PhD project understands migrant-led creative craft enterprises in the UK as resilient, post-growth microeconomies. It will investigate how these practices generate cultural continuity, ethical local revival, and alternative futures in deprived areas, centring migrant agency and third-sector contribution within interdisciplinary debates on resilience, postgrowth futures, and migrant creativity.

Full description: Migrant Creative Enterprises and Post-Growth Futures in the UK

This project investigates how workers in low-skilled and precarious jobs experience and demonstrate resilience while managing long-term mental health challenges. Using qualitative interviews and daily voice diaries, the project connects organisational and public health research to explore how work environments shape wellbeing, inequality, and inclusion in contemporary workplaces.

Full description: When Resilience Is a Must, Not a Choice: Navigating Precarious Blue-Collar Work and Mental Health in the UK

“The Volcanic Mind” uses volcanic risk reduction as a lens to explore how resilience emerges from the interplay between emotional trust and deliberative confidence in times of crisis. Combining volcanology, social science, political psychology, and creative practice, it reimagines how societies can sustain trust and adaptability in an accelerating world.

Full description: The Volcanic Mind: Lessons from Volcanoes on Trust, Confidence, and Resilience in a Changing World 

This project explores how intersectional identities shape leadership and resilience in complex public systems facing continuous crises. This project reimagines system leadership as a socially embedded, equity-driven process, bridging lived experience, culture and adaptive governance to strengthen public and third sector responses in an era of uncertainty.

Full description: Intersections of Resilience: System Leadership in an Era of Endless Uncertainty

This project will explore the dynamics of resilience in selected human-altered environments by developing a set of numerical toy models rendered as arcade-style computer games. Model systems might include wildfires at the wildland-urban interface, leveed rivers, sand mining, beach nourishment, or transportation networks in hazard zones.

Full description: Developing arcade-style computer games for insight into resilience in human-altered environments

When creating a research proposal, consider the question or issue you want to address with their project. Think about the context for the idea, and how your research will be an original and interdisciplinary contribution to scholarship. Also, think about the methods you may use to conduct your research.

Potential supervisors

Because applicants submitting their own proposals may be less aware of research expertise among academic staff across the University, the programme Board will use its institutional breadth to review and recommend supervisory teams for student-led proposals.

You can search our academics to find potential supervisors whose research interests align with yours. When you find a match, contact them to discuss your ideas. Allow time for them to respond, and consider their feedback. Contacting potential supervisors as you develop your project concept will help you build a stronger application.

How to structure your proposal

Your research proposal can be up to 1,500 words (excluding a bibliography) and should include:

  • Title
  • subheadings:
    • Introduction
    • Interdisciplinary context
      • background / framing the conceptual space(s) in which your idea fits
    • Research question
    • Methods
      • including potential data sources, research methods, critical approaches you’ll use
    • Potential challenges
      • what aspects of this idea might not work? and how might you work around that?
    • Bibliography

Write with short paragraphs and sentences. Use images and diagrams as appropriate. Your submitted version should be in pdf format.

Writing your research proposal

You should keep your proposal clear and realistic. Your proposal should convey:

  • the question you want to address
  • clear objectives of what you aim to achieve
  • relationship and references to previous work in the academic (or other) literature
  • why the research is relevant and original
  • your proposed method and approach
  • how your skills will help to conduct the research
  • any training you may need to undertake the project
Applicant-led proposals should be submitted to the Faculty where the lead supervisor of the project is based.
  • To apply for a project within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities – Art, please use this link.
  • To apply for a project within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities – Humanities, please use this link.
  • To apply for a project within the Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences, please use this link.
  • To apply for a project within the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, please use this link.
  • To apply for a project within the Faculty of Medicine, please use this link.
  • To apply for a project within the Faculty of Social Sciences, please use this link.

Up to six students will comprise each cohort. We will offer:

  • 4 x studentships to UK (or UK-domiciled) students
    • fully funded for 48 months at UKRI base rates for maintenance and tuition
    • ÂŁ10k (ÂŁ2.5k per year) Research Support and Training Grant
  • 1 x studentship to an international student
    • fully funded for 48 months at UKRI maintenance and University international tuition rates
    • ÂŁ10k (ÂŁ2.5k per year) Research Support and Training Grant
  • 1 x “Master’s + PhD” studentship to an eligible UK (or UK-domiciled) student*
    • fully funded for 60 months at UKRI maintenance and University tuition rates for:
      • 12 months master’s degree
      • 48 months doctoral degree
      • ÂŁ10k (ÂŁ2.5k per year) Research Support and Training Grant

*Note that funds for the “Master’s + PhD” track are ring-fenced for supporting students from underrepresented groups. To be eligible, applicants must be:

  1. a UK domiciled student
  2. not already have a master’s degree from the University of Southampton
  3. be from a low-income household background evidenced by, for example, being in receipt of a full maintenance loan or Special Support loan during their undergraduate studies

and/or

  1. be one of the following categories of ethnicity:
    • Black African
    • Black Caribbean
    • Black Other
    • Mixed – White and Black Caribbean
    • Mixed – White and Black African
    • Other mixed background (including Black African, Black Caribbean and Black Other)

General requirements

You will need to have a 2:1 honours undergraduate degree or equivalent qualification. If your grade was lower than 2:1 you can still apply, but your application and narrative CV should demonstrate progression since your degree.

If you have completed a master’s degree, you should have achieved a merit or above including 60% for the dissertation. If you have not completed a master’s, you’ll need to show you can produce high quality writing and analysis.

English language requirements

If English isn’t your first language, you’ll need to demonstrate that you possess a minimum standard of English language proficiency in order to be admitted to a course at the University, per University requirements. Full information on English language proficiency requirements are available here.

Selection criteria will emphasise interdisciplinarity and the applicant’s potential to undertake research.

The deadline to apply for a project is 31st January 2026. Please ensure that all of the necessary documents are submitted to ensure that the application will be considered.

** When applying, please submit your application documents to the programme associated with your chosen project. The application link for each programme can be found within the project description.**

 Minimum documentation required for your application to be considered:

  • PIRS Scholarship application (download: (2026/27) PIRS cover application)
  • An academic transcript of your undergraduate degree showing modules and marks achieved, in English.
  • An undergraduate degree certificate (if you have graduated).
  • An academic transcript from your master’s degree (if applicable) showing modules and marks achieved.
  • A master’s degree certificate (if applicable, and if you have graduated).
  • Project proposal if applying for an applicant-led project. Further guidance on creating a project can be found here.

It would benefit your application to submit the following documents:

Applications submitted without all of the necessary documents will not be shortlisted for further consideration.

All shortlisted candidates will be invited to interview.

If you are an international (non-UK) applicant – please note that PIRS cannot cover the costs of a visa and UK health-check fees associated with enrolling in a PhD programme as an international student. Nor will those costs be otherwise covered by the University. This incurred expense (should you accept an offer) may inform your decision to apply.