Open Positions – Join Our Team!
Discover open positions at the HIT Lab NZ and how to apply to join our team.
PhD Scholarship Position – Enhancing whanaungatanga with infants through immersive VR
We are looking for a student to undertake doctoral research on using immersive virtual reality in early childhood education and healthcare.
This PhD is part of a project funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) New Zealand. The candidate will work in a trans-disciplinary team which will develop new grammars for bi-cultural relational skills between caregiver and healthcare provider and infants, applied and tested in an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment. They will contribute to the development and evaluation of the environment, including user feedback mechanisms and an intelligent system orchestrating a virtual baby’s preferences, responses and behavior. This will include expert interviews and the design and deployment of user studies as well as processing the collected data. The project will make use of an existing VR prototype, which will be further developed.
The successful candidate will join the Human Interface Technology (HIT Lab NZ) in the Faculty of Engineering and the School of Teacher Education at the Faculty of Education – University of Canterbury, and will be supervised by Assoc. Prof. Heide Lukosch and Prof. Jayne White. It is expected that the successful candidate will take part in trans-disciplinary work, including empirical data collection, in the areas of HCI and education. This PhD is part of a collaboration with the University of Otago, Christchurch.
Key qualifications and skills
The successful candidate will undertake research on:
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- bi-cultural design guidelines for an immersive VR learning environment for relational skills with infants, and
- the experience and learning effects of the VR learning environment with the target audience.
The ideal candidate will have:
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- A relevant bachelor’s degree with honours or research-based master’s degree (or equivalent) in the field of HCI, Computer Science, Educational Technology, Science Communication, or similar.
- Strong interpersonal, cultural and relational skills across disciplines.
- Appropriate research and writing skills and the capacity to conduct complex literature reviews (desirable to have experience with Zotero and/or NVivo).
- Experience with research processes including participatory, user-centred, or co-design.
- Prior experience or commitment to research processes such as interviews, user studies and evaluation.
- Desirable skills in public sector communications.
- Excellent spoken and written English.
Stipend
$35,000 NZD plus study fees per year for 3 years.
How to apply
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- Letter of motivation detailing experience/background in relation to the listed key qualifications
- CV
- Academic transcript
Final date for receiving applications
31st January 2025.
Contact for applications and informal enquiries
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- Assoc. Prof. Heide Lukosch, HIT Lab NZ, University of Canterbury
- Prof. Jayne White, Faculty of Education, University of Canterbury