King's College London

About Us

We look forward to welcoming the successful candidates to the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health (CSMH; www.kcl.ac.uk/csmh) and the Health Service and Population Research Department (HSPR; www.kcl.ac.uk/hspr), at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London.

About The Role

Overview

We are looking for two highly motivated and talented postdoctoral researchers to work with Dr Gemma Knowles and team on an exciting new research project on youth mental health. The project starts in April 2025 and is funded by a 5-year Wellcome Trust Mental Health Award.

The Team

We are a multidisciplinary team based in London, Tokyo, and Mannheim. The successful candidates will join the London team and collaborate across sites. We are a friendly, supportive, passionate, and hard-working group. We place great value on working with young people from diverse backgrounds to deliver relevant, engaging, inclusive, and impactful research.

The Project and Roles

The project aims to understand and find new solutions to gender inequalities in youth mental health. We primarily seek to uncover the causal mechanisms through which sexism, misogyny, and gender inequality impact mental health during the teenage years and early adulthood. The project consists of three work packages (WPs):

• WP1 and WP3 will generate novel data in new school-based cohorts.
• WP2 will analyse existing data from multiple youth cohorts.

The two postholders will lead the day-to-day delivery of WP1 and WP3, supporting the WP2 team when needed. (A WP2 postdoc position with Dr Dario Moreno-Agostino at UCL will be advertised simultaneously.) WP1 and WP3 will involve various data collection methods, including wearables, experience sampling, biological sampling, questionnaires, and qualitative interviews. WP1 and WP3 also include two literature reviews and the co-design of new measure(s) of sexism, misogyny, and gender inequality for this age group. All aspects of the project, including the funding proposal, have been and will be coproduced with young people, schools, and community members. We are looking for two high-energy postdocs with relevant methodological expertise and outstanding ability to inspire, engage, and involve schools and diverse groups of young people in epidemiological/quantitative research as co-researchers, collaborators, and participants. We are keen to support postholders with fellowship applications, if desired, and will work with all team members to develop personalised training, support, and development plans.

Working Hours, Working Patterns

Both positions are full-time, for two years initially, starting 1st April 2025. Team members will spend at least 60% of their time at the office, with some variation by project stage. Frequent school visits (daily/weekly) will be necessary during intensive data collection phases; at such times, remote working may not be possible. Some out-of-hours work (e.g., evenings, early mornings, the odd weekend) may be required, e.g., to accommodate our community coproduction team, young co-researchers, and time-zone differences (Tokyo is +9hrs GMT). Coproduction activities may also necessitate some in-person working during school holidays.

Interview

Interviews are expected to take place at our Strand office in central London during the week commencing 3rd Febuary 2025. Young people are invited to join the panel. A short pre-interview task will be shared with shortlisted candidates in due course. This is a full-time post (35 Hours per week), and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 31st March 2027.

About you

Essential criteria

1. PhD or equivalent experience in a relevant area, e.g., population mental health, social epidemiology, quantitative social science, sociology, or other relevant area/topic (awarded or near completion)
2. Exceptional ability to inspire, engage, and involve young people from diverse backgrounds in scientific research, as co-researchers and participants
3. Excellent ability to work well in a team and create inclusive and supportive environments in which junior colleagues (e.g., research assistants, PhD students) are well supported
4. Experience of juggling multiple deadlines and effectively prioritizing tasks
5. Excellent knowledge, skills, or experience in at least 3 of the following:

a. Systematic reviews, scoping reviews, detailed literature reviews, or meta-analysis

b. Designing, piloting, and evaluating new measures, e.g., questionnaires

c. Applied measurement modelling

d. Experience sampling methods (ESM)

e. Passive data collection methods, e.g., wearables, app-based

f. Biological sampling with young people, e.g., saliva, blood, hair

g. Coproducing quantitative or mixed-methods research with young people or experts-by-experience

h. Conducting research in schools

i. Managing, cleaning, and analysing large/longitudinal datasets

j. Coordinating research projects (or similar)

k. Relevant social theory, e.g., intersectionality, ecosocial, feminist

l. Advanced quantitative methods, e.g., growth modelling, structural equation modelling, growth mixture modelling, mediation models, multiple imputation or other methods for handling missing data, methods for analysing intensive longitudinal data, etc.

Please indicate clearly in your application your 3+ areas of expertise.

Desirable criteria

1. Experience of collecting or analysing qualitative data, e.g., focus groups, interviews
2. Experience of working in a multi-disciplinary or international team, or with partners/collaborators for whom English is a second/third language
3. Experience of living or working in Japan, or ability to speak/read Japanese, or some understanding of the mental health research landscape in Japan

Downloading a copy of our Job Description Full details of the role and the skills, knowledge and experience required can be found in the Job Description document, provided at the bottom of the next page after you click “Apply Now”. This document will provide information of what criteria will be assessed at each stage of the recruitment process.

Further Information

We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming. We embrace diversity and want everyone to feel that they belong and are connected to others in our community. We are committed to working with our staff and unions on these and other issues, to continue to support our people and to develop a diverse and inclusive culture at King's. We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the advert. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible. To find out how our managers will review your application, please take a look at our ‘How we Recruit’ pages.

Interviews are due to be held week commencing 3rd Febuary 2025.