Current PhD studentships

Please note that applications for October 2024 are now closed. Applications for October 2025 will open in November 2024

Based in Milton Keynes, UK

Each year, the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS) offers full-time funded PhD studentships for an October start.

Funding is available for UK, EU and international students. Fully-funded PhD studentships will include fees and maintenance for three years, depending on satisfactory progress. Anticipated stipend for 2025/2026 is approximately £18,622 per annum.

Faculty studentships for 2025 will be prioritised for doctoral research proposals based, but not exclusively, on one of the following research projects.

Education, Childhood, Youth and Sport

• Children’s rights in sport
• Understanding Attitudes and countering stigma to tackle poverty and inequality
• Reading and Writing for Pleasure
• Strength and conditioning for Golf
• Injury prevention in Tennis
• METEOR

Educational and Learning Technology

• Citizen Science group in IET

Health, Wellbeing, Social Work and Social Care

• Barriers and facilitators to physical activity for transplant recipients; developing a Patient and Public Involvement and engagement framework (PA-PPI)
• Fathers experience of perinatal loss and support needs
• Digital transformation and its impact in a cashless society on marginalised communities
• Engaging South Asian young adult carers not in contact with health and social care services
• The Gender Pain Gap in women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health across the Life Course
• Identifying the Education and support needs of newly qualified nurses
• Improving shared decision-making for underserved populations who are at risk of, or are living with, cardiovascular diseases. Shared Decision making for underserved populations

Languages and Applied Linguistics 

• Discourse studies group in Languages and Applied Linguistics
• PIPE: Pragmatics and Interaction in Professional Emails

Closing date for applications (including for self-funded study): 31st January 2025.

We anticipate interviews will take place in early March 2025.

The Open University is offering full and part-time PhD studentships in health and wellbeing and innovation in learning, funded in collaboration with the ESRC funded Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership.

Health and wellbeing pathway

Achieving good health and supporting wellbeing for all is essential to achieving social justice, and this lies at the heart of the Open University’s mission. We are keen to attract students to work with us on research that locates the experiences of service users, ‘patients’, carers, family members and practitioners at the fore of inquiry.

We place value on participatory and inclusive research particularly with individuals that are marginalised, ‘hard to reach’ or have complex needs. We also have research expertise in population-level research. Our research draws on various methodologies and forms of analysis and much is based on multidisciplinary work across the social sciences, in particular drawing on medical sociology, critical psychology, public health, anthropology and other critical, applied social sciences.

Applications are invited on one or more of the following themes:

• age, ageing and later life
• children, young people, parenting and families
• death, dying and bereavement
• disability and long-term conditions
• reproductive and sexual health
• care and caring
• mental health

For more information on the application process see The Open University MPhil and PhD Application Process website.
To inquire about these studentships, please email Justin Rogers.

Closing date: 12.00 pm on 7th January 2025. Interviews will be held in early February 2025.

Innovation in Learning Pathway

This pathway is dedicated to supporting research into innovative approaches to learning, teaching and assessment. Innovation in Learning welcomes and encourages research into novel and imaginative approaches to learning, teaching and assessment. Our focus is on the use of digital technology to support openness and inclusion in education. We are especially interested in work that explores the interface between formal and informal learning.

Specific areas of interest include:

• technology-enhanced learning (learning analytics, innovation, openness)
• technologies for inclusion (assistive technology use by disabled learners)
• child-led research (e.g. digital storytelling) creativity and technology use
• online intercultural and language exchange
• technologies for social and global justice life histories: technology, learning disability and the ‘good life’
• what (and how) children learn about food from the digital media
• how translators use digital tools
• using digital tools for international development
• MOOCs for the continuing professional development of teachers
• using eye-tracking to research language learning and teaching

For more information on the application process see The Open University MPhil and PhD Application Process website.
To inquire about these studentships, please email Margaret Ebubedike.

Closing date: 12.00 pm on 7th January 2025. Interviews will be held in early February 2025.

If you would like to find out more about the studentships, please refer to PhD Funded Studentship Opportunities | Employment (open.ac.uk) and CDAs 2025-26 | Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership (oocdtp.ac.uk).