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Applications are invited for a fully-funded three year PhD to commence in October 2026.

The PhD will be based in the Faculty of Science and Health within the School of Psychology, Sport and Health Sciences, and will be supervised by Dr Stefana Juncu, Dr Liam Satchell and Professor Lorraine Hope. 

Candidates applying for this project may be eligible to compete for one of a small number of bursaries available. Successful applicants will receive a bursary to cover tuition fees for three years and a stipend in line with the UKRI rate (£20,780 for 2025/26).Bursary recipients will also receive a £1,500 p.a. for project costs/consumables.

Costs for student visa and immigration health surcharge are not covered by this bursary. For further guidance and advice visit our international and EU students ‘Visa FAQs’ page.

Please note, these funded PhDs are only open to new students who do not hold a previous doctoral level qualification. 

The ability to identify a specific unfamiliar person in a crowded, dynamic environment is critical for many emergency services. Security professionals, police officers, or paramedics may be required to locate an individual with little more than a brief description or an out-of-context photograph, and their success can have serious consequences. This task aligns with the concept of prospective person memory, the ability to remember and later recognise a target individual under demanding and unpredictable conditions (Lampinen et al., 2016). Previous research shows that prospective person memory is difficult even under ideal circumstances (Moore et al., 2016), making it vital to understand both its theoretical basis and its applied relevance in high-stakes contexts. Psychological research in this field has traditionally focused on face recognition in controlled laboratory settings. While this work has revealed important insights, it captures only a small part of what person recognition demands.  In practice, identifying someone depends on a combination of cognitive factors (individual recognition skills), translation factors (how well descriptions or photographs convey a person), and contextual factors (the demands and resources of realistic events). This PhD project seeks to investigating how people search for and recognise specific individuals in realistic, complex environments. It will examine factors such as person recognition ability, the usefulness of descriptive information, and the behavioural strategies people use when trying to locate someone. Rather than simplifying tasks to fit laboratory research designs, this programme of research adopts a complexity-first approach: studying recognition in naturalistic conditions and working backwards to understand the mechanisms that support (or hinder) performance. Studies may involve monitoring how effectively individuals find a target person in an everyday setting (such as, on a street, in a crowd, in a venue) and explaining variance in this performance using measures of cognition, behaviour, social skills, and environmental factors.  

How to apply

If you have any project-specific questions please contact Dr Stefana Juncu (Stefana.juncu@port.ac.uk), quoting the project code.

When you are ready to apply, please use our . Make sure you submit a personal statement, proof of your degrees and grades, details of two referees, proof of your English language proficiency and an up-to-date CV.  Our ‘How to Apply’ page offers further guidance on the PhD application process.

Please also include a research proposal of 1,000 words outlining the main features of your proposed research design – including how it meets the stated objectives, the challenges this project may present, and how the work will build on or challenge existing research in the above field.

If you want to be considered for this funded PhD opportunity you must quote project code PSH50630126 when applying. Please note that email applications are not accepted.