This project investigates the political, legal, and administrative contexts that enabled the opening of The Thistle Safer Drug Consumption Facility (SDCF) in Glasgow in January 2025—the first such service in the UK. This involved extensive public debate, protracted legal deliberation, and complex inter-agency negotiations involving local and national government, police,

Across the world, surveys shape decisions made by governments, NGOs, journalists, international organisations, and private firms. They influence public policy, democratic debates, and how inequality is understood. But surveys rely on a powerful assumption: that respondents are attentive, engaged, and equally willing to express their views. What if that assumption

MCR Pathways is a charity that supports young people who have had traumatic experiences including being in care, losing a parent or abuse (https://mcrpathways.org). MCR’s aim is to support young people into positive post-school destinations through in-school support and a community mentoring programme. To secure funding and learning for the

What we eat has significant impacts on human and planetary health. Poor diet is the biggest contributor to preventable ill-health and the food system produces approximately one third of carbon emissions globally. While household dietary change is pertinent, this is hampered by entrenched behaviours that are challenging to change. Community

This project will provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the behavioural and distributional effects of Scottish Income Tax divergence from the rest of the UK. Since 2018, Scotland has introduced distinctive tax rates and bands, creating a quasi-experimental setting to understand how tax affects work incentives, income adjustment behaviours, and

Established in 2005, Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit (SVRU) pioneered a public health approach to violence prevention by addressing the social determinants of violence, rather than relying solely on enforcement. Following a 58% reduction in violent crime volume from 2008-09 to 2021-22 and a halving of Scotland’s homicide rate since 2008-09,

This research explores how alternative and social finance models can support the development of impact-driven deep tech ventures: science-based innovations with potential to address complex societal challenges, such as in biotech, quantum computing, space technologies and emerging green energy innovations. Deep tech ventures typically face long R&D cycles, high technical

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is common and serious: UK survival is only ~10%. Immediate cardio-pulmonary-resuscitation (CPR) increases survival but is often not provided, even when ambulance services provide telephone instructions. Lay-responders encounter barriers to delivering CPR AND can experience significant distress. Currently, there is NO high-quality evidence about how telephone-CPR

Twenty percent of Scotland’s population, 1.1 million people, live with a chest, heart or stroke (CHS) condition. The health and well-being benefits of physical activity (PA) for people with CHS conditions outweigh the risks; however, more than half do not get referred to rehabilitation services and face condition-specific barriers to

Routine childhood vaccination coverage in England has been declining since 2013, but the burden of disease risk is not evenly distributed across the population and is particularly acute among undervaccinated children from minoritised backgrounds. People of Black Caribbean heritage in England and Scotland are consistently less likely to receive routine

Parental substance use is a major contributor to child protection involvement, accounting for nearly two-fifths of registrations in Scotland’s Child Protection Register (2023/24). Although both parents’ substance use can affect child wellbeing, mothers are more often primary caregivers and thus more frequently come into contact with child protection services. While

Repair can be understood as a civic practice and an essential form of care, particularly in the face of ecological crises and the need to move towards a circular economy. Most research on repair tends to focus on infrastructure and maintenance labour, rather than community-led approaches. This studentship will focus

Many of Scotland’s rural and island communities are experiencing long-term patterns of demographic decline. National policies and strategies, including the National Islands Plan and the Addressing Depopulation Action Plan, aim to address this challenge through population attraction and retention, focusing on attracting sufficient numbers of new migrants needed to reverse

National Security and the “New” Industrial Policy: A Comparative Political Economy of Quantum Technology Strategies This project investigates the intersection of national security and emerging industrial policy through the lens of quantum technology development. In the wake of NATO’s 2025 pledge to increase defence spending and a broader Western turn

About the project In Scotland 1 in 5 children are neurodivergent (e.g. autistic/with ADHD) and nearly 1 in 4 live in poverty. Many neurodivergent children and those living in poverty experience difficulties in accessing school, with long-term implications for employment and mental health. This project quantitatively explores the social inequality

This PhD project develops a new quantitative framework for analysing how inequality and macroeconomic dynamics interact in modern economies. Classical overlapping generations (OLG) models are central to macroeconomics but typically treat shocks in a simplified way, focusing on aggregate disturbances while ignoring correlations across individuals and cohorts. Meanwhile, random growth

Children and young people’s reading habits are changing. Across the UK, the last two decades have seen considerable shifts in children and young people’s reading attitudes and practices, with reports of continued declines in reading enjoyment and engagement (Clark et al., 2025). Understanding contemporary volitional reading practices (e.g., song lyrics,

Many parts of rural Scotland face well documented and longstanding demographic and economic challenges, a major cause and symptom of which is significant labour and skills shortages. These issues are particularly pronounced in the Highlands and Islands. Whilst the nature and consequences of population shrinkage and ageing are relatively well

Access to reliable and verifiable sources, which can document human rights abuses or violations of international humanitarian law, are crucial in legal contexts. Spatial open-source intelligence (S-OSINT), which is information gathered from publicly available data, such as remote sensing observations, geotagged IOT sensors or social network data, has become an

Around a third of sexual abuse is perpetrated by children and young people. However, current assessment tools have primarily been informed by what is known about the treatment needs of adult sexual offenders, and there is a lack of research involving young people and their families. Employing a participatory action

Global defence expenditure reached $2.7 trillion in 2024, marking a 9.4% annual increase—the steepest since the Cold War (SIPRI, 2025). As military budgets expand amidst rising geopolitical tensions, corruption risk in the defence sector represents a critical governance challenge with direct security consequences. Research demonstrates that corrupt defence institutions undermine

How are new residential mobility trends bringing increasing deprivation, housing precarity and population unsustainability to certain neighbourhoods and populations? This project examines the growing phenomenon of the ‘mobilities slowdown’ which describes a decline in residential mobility across higher income countries. Given that the ability to move house has been demonstrated

The negative consequences of school absence for employment destinations are well-known: Klein & Sosu (2024) found risk tier levels impacted attitudes to absence, with a more pronounced effect on pupils of lower socio-economic status, who are also disproportionately impacted by declines in parent-school engagement (Gibbons, McNally & Montebruno 2023). Further,