Thrive Scholarship

Thrive: Finishing School well.  

Transforming early Education and Child Health Research Centre (TeEACH)

Lead Researcher. Professor Rebekah Grace

We are calling for potential HDR students who are interested in being part of a large multi-disciplinary project focused on addressing education inequity and supporting young people to thrive. We will support promising candidates to identify and apply for scholarship opportunities (e.g. the WSU PhD scholarship scheme) to support their engagement with this project.

Thrive: Finishing School Well is an exciting 3.5 year project funded by the Paul Ramsay Foundation to understand and contribute to supporting young people to thrive within education settings. It is a partnership between Western Sydney University (WSU) and the University of Technology (UTS). Thrive promises to deliver new insights into the factors that influence engagement and school completion using mixed-methods, including qualitative participatory and co-design methods, and data analytic machine learning methods. A multi-disciplinary team of WSU researchers will engage young people, families, schools and communities in qualitative research to uncover the factors that contribute to school success for all students, including those who experience marginalisation and disadvantage.  Data scientists at UTS will use existing large datasets to model and analyse causal pathways to educational success. Our collective insights will be used to design and trial innovative strategies to improve school engagement.

This represents an opportunity to develop a project with support from an internationally recognised team of social science and data science experts. The student will be based at the Transforming early Education and Child Health Research Centre (TeEACH) at Westmead Innovation Quarter and supervised by a cross-University team of Thrive chief investigators from WSU and UTS. The student will join a join a team of PhD candidates whose projects contribute to the broad Thrive project aims. This offers a unique opportunity to develop applied research skills and be part of a collaborative and cross-disciplinary research team that includes industry partnership. We are looking for Higher Degree research students who would value the opportunity to develop expertise in:

• qualitative participatory and co-design methods
• data analytic and AI machine learning methods, OR
• mixed-methods including both qualitative and data analytic methods.

Additionally, this program offers students the option of an industry placement to gain real-world experiences and be job-ready.

For questions and advice about the research project, please contact Rebekah Grace at Rebekah.Grace@westernsydney.edu.au to discuss your eligibility, the project requirements and your intention to apply.