Post Doctoral Research Associate in Policing

Closing Date: 20 July 2026

Weekly

Working Hours:

14.8

Contract Type: Fixed Term Contract

Fixed Term

Contract:

End Date: 31 July 2027

Change your career, change lives

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We are seeking to appoint a highly motivated Postdoctoral Research Associate to join the ‘Creators & Consumers’ project, an innovative research programme examining perpetration and policing responses to deepfake‑enabled violence against women and girls (VAWG).

The role is based within the School of Policing in the Faculty of Business and Law and the Centre for Protecting Women Online (CPWO), a Research England‑funded centre dedicated to addressing technology‑facilitated harms against women and girls. The successful candidate will work closely with Dr Hannah Guy and Dr Nelli Stavropoulou across the CPWO’s Policing and Human Behaviour research streams.

Funded through the Open Societal Challenge, the Creators & Consumers:
Perpetration and Policing Responses to Deepfake‑Enabled Violence Against Women & Girls (VAWG) project (https://so) is among the first UK‑based empirical studies to examine how deepfake‑enabled abuse is perpetrated, identified, recorded, and investigated.

Working in partnership with police forces and other stakeholders, the project aims to generate new evidence on perpetration dynamics, investigative practices, and data recording processes, while developing practical resources to support improved responses to this emerging form of harm.

The successful candidate will contribute to a range of research activities, including qualitative data collection and analysis, impact evaluation, and the development of practitioner‑facing resources. The role offers an exciting opportunity to work on a high‑profile interdisciplinary project with strong potential for real‑world impact across policing, safeguarding, and violence prevention.

The CPWO’s work is delivered through five interwoven Work Streams. Please visit our Centre website () and Linked In page () for further details.

Please note the funding for this project is time bound and therefore, whilst we can be flexible with the start date of the contract (1st September 2026), we would like someone to start as soon as possible.

The person appointed will be expected to contribute to the sustained research delivery of the ‘Creators & Consumers’ project. The main responsibilities of the role include:

• Support the organisation, management, and secure storage of project data in accordance with ethical, legal, and institutional requirements.
• Support the collection, preparation, and analysis of relevant data across the lifecycle of the project, including police case data, interview data, and ethnographic materials.
• Undertake ethnographic observation and conduct semi‑structured interviews with policing contacts.
• Contribute to the development and implementation of research procedures, including data collection, documentation, and analysis processes.
• Conduct targeted literature reviews and evidence searches to support project activities, identify emerging developments in the field, and inform data analysis, reporting, and resource development.
• Support the synthesis, interpretation, and reporting of findings, including the production of analytical reports, practitioner‑facing outputs, and academic publications.
• Contribute to the translation of research findings into practical outputs, including a practitioner toolkit and graphic novel proposal.
• Support the design, delivery, and evaluation of stakeholder engagement, impact, and knowledge exchange activities, including workshops, feedback collection, and evaluation reporting.
• Liaise with project partners and external stakeholders, including police forces and other collaborators, to support effective project delivery.
• Work closely with all Open Societal Challenge team members to support and enhance project delivery, ensuring continuity across work packages and project milestones.
• Contribute to wider dissemination and impact activities arising from the project.

• A completed PhD (‘completed’ is defined as…