Research Technician

This is a part time (0.6 fte) position for a fixed-term period of 2 year directly funded by the MyWorld project .

You will provide technical support for research activities around behavioural and physiological monitoring of real world audiences and the development of virtual reality studies. 

This is an exciting opportunity to be part of a large collaborative team. MyWorld is a new five-year programme and aims to position the South West as an international trailblazer in screen-based media.

This £46m programme brings together 30 partners from Bristol and Bath’s creative technologies sector and world-leading academic institutions, to create a unique cross-sector consortium. MyWorld will forge dynamic collaborations to progress technological innovation, deliver creative excellence, establish and operate state of the art facilities, offer skills training and drive inward investment, raising the region’s profile on the global stage.

Within MyWorld our Workpackage is focused on the design and evaluation of audience and user experiences both in the real world and in Virtual Reality (VR). There are a range of methods available to measure these effects on audience: interviews, surveys, physiological monitoring, measuring behaviour. Our programme of research will map out these pre-existing methods, evaluate and validate them, and then add new cutting-edge methods to this battery. We will be working over a range of experiences (TV, VR, AR, Live Theatre, etc.) and with differing types of content (drama, documentary, news). The aim is to have real impact in providing the creative industries with an easy to access toolkit to support audience understanding. 

The main role will involve supporting staff and PhD students to develop real world and virtual reality studies. For example, developing environments, setting up experiments and supporting analysis of data. There is the potential for you to co-author papers. The role at Bath will support the local MyWorld team.

You will be part of the Psychology technical support team and will also be involved in other relevant support tasks such as

• helping maintain the VR and CREATE lab facilities and supplies (eg, consumables)
• equipment maintenance schedules
• staying current with VR tech
• up-to-date Standard Operating Procedures that comply with appropriate health and safety requirements.

This includes being responsible for carrying out risk assessments. You will also provide support for developing CREATE lab webpages and research videos on MyWorld. Training courses can be provided if specific skills are required. 

Over the last few years the University of Bath has made substantial investments to infrastructure including multi-million pound state-of-the art facilities for the Psychology department. The department has a dedicated building, which consists of eleven labs (including an EEG lab; a cross modal lab; a VR facility and an HCI lab: the CREATE Lab). 

For an informal discussion about the role please contact Danaë Stanton Fraser on [email protected] .

Find out more about our benefits .

We consider ourselves to be an inclusive university, where difference is celebrated, respected and encouraged. We have an excellent international reputation with staff from over 60 different nations and have made a positive commitment towards gender equality and intersectionality receiving a Silver Athena SWAN award . We truly believe that diversity of experience, perspectives, and backgrounds will lead to a better environment for our employees and students, so we encourage applications from all genders, backgrounds, and communities, particularly from under-represented groups, and value the positive impact that will have on our teams. 

We are very proud to be an autism friendly university and are an accredited Disability Confident Leader; committed to building disability confidence and supporting disabled staff .

Find out from our staff what makes the University of Bath a great place to work. Follow us @UniofBath and @UniofBathJobs on Twitter for more information.

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We are constantly seeking to reduce the unconscious bias that enters any assessment process, with the goal of creating an inclusive and equal assessment process. To support this, personal details will be removed from application forms at the initial shortlisting stage.