Research Fellow, Computer Science / HCI

Southampton, England, United Kingdom

6/7/2025

WellthLab in the Agents, Interactions & Complexity Group

Interested in innovating interactive technologies to help #makeNormalBetter for all? Excellent and committed researcher? Come join the WellthLab. The WellthLab's mission is to explore how interactive technologies can support people to feel, how they feel, better. Our philosophy is to design for a minimal data dose, and our main methodology is inbodied interaction.

Some of the projects you’d be engaged in, towards building your own questions:

• XB – directed self-experimentation for tuning personal knowledge skills and practice Experiment in a Box (XB) is a core platform to facilitate guided self-experimentation in healthful practices with a Minimal Data Dose approach. How to offer these experiments with minimal human support is one question; working with international colleagues, we are also looking at how to understand and support better social contextualisation, for community-based design. Take a look at our Experiment in a Box paper for examples.
• Incidental Interaction (priority project) – how can every day interactions – sitting, standing, getting out of bed, closing a door – be instrumented to go polymorphic? To support other kinds of healthful interactions, like building strength, improving balance
• Synthesising co-presence – What makes in person interaction more intimate and often more challenging, but also more effective and trust-inducing, than online meetings? What biological signals and qualities in human co-presence interaction might we synthesise to create better quality of interaction when remote?
• Non-visual Augmented Reality for Learning in Context – Movement and memory go together. How can we leverage movement over and through our environment to build new skills – like 2nd language acquisition - to thrive better, faster, longer?
• Future of Healthful Work – a large scale interdisciplinary program we’re leading asks the question “what if work were healthful from the outset, rather than being something from which we have to recover?” A question within interactive technology of course is how does technology embody the interests that inform the shape of work, and what normalises those practices, not unusually that lead away from resilience/quality of life?
  
  

The WellthLab is interdisciplinary – our members are mainly situated in the Electronics and Computer Science School of the University of Southampton. We also collaborate with academics in Physiology, Psychology, Humanities, Arts and Sociology. As such, we are looking for people who are motivated to collaborate with these teams, and who are keen to build their research leadership skills, to develop innovative, strong research contributions, and to become a field leader in inbodied interaction approaches to help #makeNormalBetter for all, at scale.

If you have the drive to do the challenging work to succeed at an international level, you’ll be in great company. Please read the person spec, too. We take it seriously: you’ll have the opportunity to work with great resaerchers, phd students, colleagues in the lab, the university and internationally. You’ll also have opportunities to work with our stakeholders and partners. That’s a lot of responsibility – with significant career opportunities. Members of our lab have gone onto careers in leading industries and academia. While you join us to help #makeNormalBetter for all at scale, we are committed to help you build your career.

If you have any questions, please contact prof m.c. schraefel directly at [email protected]

Applications for Research Fellow positions will be considered from candidates who are working towards or nearing completion of a relevant PhD qualification. The title of Research Fellow will be applied upon successful completion of the PhD. Prior to the qualification being awarded the title of Senior Research Assistant will be given.