A Postdoctoral Research Associate position in physical activity is available, full-time, for a period of 3 years within the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Durham University. The post provides an exciting opportunity to make a major contribution to the £1million+ funded ‘Moving Social Work’ project. Working in partnership with Disability Rights UK, Moving Social Work is a co-produced programme of research that aims to embed physical activity advocacy with and for disabled people into the education, training, and routine practice of social work.
The department is seeking creative, high-quality researchers with a background in sport and exercise sciences, social work, health psychology, sociology, critical disability studies and/or other relevant disciplines/areas that can strike a balance between research, practice, and knowledge translation skills. The successful applicant will lead and conduct a national mixed methods intervention to enable social workers to be advocates of physical activity in their routine work with disabled people, other service users, and multi-agency teams. They will be expected to co-ordinate day-to-day research activity aimed at embedding physical activity promotion in social work further and higher education, and continued professional development. This will include coordinating study set-up, recruitment of sites and participants, mixed methods data collection, qualitative and quantitative analysis, creation of resources and toolkits, write-up of findings, drafting of progress reports, knowledge translation activities, and evaluating impact.
The successful applicant will work closely with the Moving Social Work team to support co-production, enable transdisciplinary work to flourish, and ensure findings are integrated into the research programme and implemented in practice. The position will provide the opportunity to develop one’s career by, for example, enhancing leadership and management skills, learning about and implementing new research methods, leading and contributing to research outputs, and learning more about and delivering impactful research in collaboration with different partners and the research team.
The successful applicant will be supported and mentored by a team comprising academic leads and strategic management leads. They will work under the direct supervision of Professor Brett Smith (he, him, his), the Principal Investigator of Moving Social Work. They will also be supported by members of the Moving Social Work team, including Drs Toni Williams (she, her, hers), Iain Lindsey (he, him, his) and Patrick Jachyra (he, him, his), and the project manager working within Disability Rights UK. They will receive appropriate mentorship, conference funding, personal office space, and professional training to support their career development.
https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DEU613/postdoctoral-researcher-in-physical-activity
