PhD in Psychology And Neuroscience

We investigate how the brain produces behaviour by looking at how movements are generated and adjusted to meet animals’ needs. We currently have two fully-funded PhD projects available, starting at any point during the 2026-2027 academic calendar. Both have a computational focus and are new collaborations for the lab. The first, in collaboration with Prof Tatjana Tchumatchenko (University of Bonn), involves building a multi-scale model to explain how cerebelllar networks adapt their according to stimulus novelty and salience. In the second, in collaboration with Dr David Harris-Birtill (University of St Andrews), the student will further develop a deep-learning based behavioural analysis tool. We aim to build a multi-modal graph neural network-based approach building onprevious workthat fuses information from animal pose and clues from audio and video to classify behaviour and relate it to the animal’s environment and other animals present in the recording. Please send informal enquiries to: mfz [at] st-andrews.ac.uk.