PhD Studentship : Mapping variability in neural representations of social and emotion concepts Full-time

PhD Studentship: Mapping Variability in Neural Representations of Social and Emotion Concepts

UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN), is based in Queen Square, London. Our overall mission is to improve the lives, health and wellbeing through world-class patient centred research, education and public engagement. As a world-class centre of excellence, UCL ICN is focussed on interdisciplinary research bringing together different disciplines and combining behavioural studies with neuroimaging, brain stimulation and neurophysiology to understand both healthy cognitive function and disorders.

The Knowledge and Concepts Group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience is seeking a talented, ambitious, and energetic PhD candidate to study how whole-brain patterns of evoked neural responses measured by fMRI encode information about social and emotion concepts, and how these patterns vary across individuals.

About the Role

Project overview

The student will work within the Knowledge and Concepts Group (group leader Tim Rogers), aiding in the design, implementation, and analysis of functional brain imaging data collected via fMRI while participants view and process images and words depicting various social and emotion concepts. The central hypothesis is that detailed social and emotional information is encoded by patterns of activation distributed widely in the brain; that such patterns vary considerably across individuals; and that the individual variation is not random but structured. Analyses will apply state of the art neural decoding, pattern classification, model regularization, bipartite matching, and other machine learning techniques to test these hypotheses.

Duration: The position is offered full-time for 3 years.

About You

We are seeking an energetic, ambitious PhD candidate with interest in the neural bases of conceptual knowledge, experience working with fMRI data, and established skills in methods for data science / machine learning analyses of large datasets. The student will study how whole-brain patterns of evoked neural responses measured by fMRI encode information about social and emotion concepts, and how these patterns vary across individuals.

Candidate profile

Essential

• Evidence of data-science/machine learning skills
• Experience programming in Python and R
• Computational / mathematical background
• Experience working with large language and language/vision models
• Training and demonstrated interest in cognition and cognitive neuroscience
• Experience analysing functional brain imaging data

Desirable

• Experience collecting functional brain imaging data
• Knowledge about the neural bases of social/emotion concepts
• Conference or peer-reviewed publications

Applicants must meet UCL PhD admissions criteria. Both home-fee and international candidates may apply.

Key Dates :

1. Application Deadline: 25th June 2026

2. Interviews: July/August

3. Start date: 1st Oct 2026

How to apply

Submit the following by using the apply button:

1. CV with referees contacts

2. Cover letter

3. Academic certificates

What We Offer

The Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship covers UK Home fees plus a stipend of £23,805 per annum. UCL will offer an “International Scholars Award for Doctoral Training” (ISAD) to cover the fee difference for successful overseas candidates.

Our Commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

As London's Global University, we know diversity fosters creativity and innovation, and we want our community to represent the diversity of the world's talent. We are committed to equality of opportunity, to being fair and inclusive, and to being a place where we all belong. We therefore particularly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented in UCL's workforce. These include people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds; disabled people; LGBTQI+ people; and for our Grade 9 and 10 roles, women.