PhD opportunities for research in psychology

I haven't had a funded PhD student of my own since I've been at Coventry and am hoping that various changes to the Faculty structure and research groups/centres will mean that I can now compete for funds to support this. I have good experience of supervision but have tended to inherit other people's students rather than taking on people whose research interests coincide directly with my own. 


The advert for PhD studentships came out online today.  If anyone reading this is interested in doing a PhD in any of the following areas and would like me to supervise, please let me know as soon as possible:


Health, especially gender specific issues, e.g. women's reproductive health, men's health behaviours; long term/chronic conditions; experiences of healthcare, e.g. good and bad experiences and need to improve patient experience.


Coping with difficult situations, especially in emergency or disaster work, e.g. mundane day to day experiences of ambulance, fire and police crews, e.g. in-theatre and post deployment experiences of armed services personnel, including but not specifically focussed on responses to traumatic situations.


I'm guessing this will be very competitive so we can work together to help refine and develop your plans.
Please see the entrance requirements online at http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/researchnet/ResearchStudents/ResearchStudentships/Pages/StudentshipDetail.aspx?stuID=73


And contact me if you'd like to talk about it further.

Disaster Management Days 2 and 3

Rather briefer report from remainder of conference...


Met a nice man from Mexico who had just arrived and was (like me) expecting to be able to walk to the venue.  We shared a taxi.  His talk was on Physical vulnerability of critical facilities in Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands


Other papers I found especially interesting included several reporting various indices and tools to assess and compare disaster preparedness, readiness and resilience, including these from the Argonne National Laboratory:


Assessing community and region emergency-services capabilities 
Community resilience: measuring a community’s ability to withstand

I was also fascinated by a couple of presentations on emergency services responses.  One of these highlighted a fairly simple problem that ought to be fairly straightforward to address.  Apparently emergency responders (n the US state of Alabama at least) often report that traffic congestion significantly affects their ability to reach people in need, and that they are rarely given traffic information when setting off to jobs. Yet emergency dispatchers report that they often give this information but feel it makes little difference to outcomes. A case for dispatchers/controllers to spend the occasional shift in the vehicle with responders? And/or to use existing traffic information systems?

A much more complicated issue is how to co-ordinate responses to exceptional events, such as  the July 2005 bombings on the London public transport system. One paper reported the use of mathematical modelling to optimise the use of resources when responding to mass casualties across multiple incident scenes.    A major issue with this work may be persuading key decision makers that mathematical models have something valuable to offer, and helping them to understand how and why the models may work.