Applications for this PhD project are now open. The deadline for applications is 6 April 2026.
Chronic musculoskeletal pain is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, yet outcomes from conservative care remain highly variable and difficult to predict. Patients with apparently similar diagnoses can respond very differently to the same treatments, and these differences are often poorly explained by structural or biomechanical findings. This PhD offers a rare opportunity to address this problem using Active Inference, an increasingly influential contemporary framework in neuroscience and cognitive science.
This PhD is distinctive in its ambition, interdisciplinarity, and potential impact. It represents one of the first attempts to operationalise Active Inference as a predictive framework in musculoskeletal pain, moving beyond post-hoc explanation toward prospective, testable models.
The findings are expected to inform future mechanistic trials, contribute to the development of screening or stratification tools, and advance the scientific understanding of contextual and embodied processes in pain recovery.
Email: david.newell@hsu.ac.uk
Rather than conceptualising pain as a direct readout of tissue damage, Active Inference frames pain as an inferential process shaped by expectations, uncertainty, learning, bodily signals, and the social and therapeutic context. Within this view, clinical improvement involves updating maladaptive predictions, recalibrating threat-related precision, and restoring confidence in bodily signals through corrective experience.
While this framework has gained significant theoretical traction in recent years, measurements associated with this approach have yet to be explored as a potential predictive model in real-world musculoskeletal care. This PhD aims to bridge that gap.
The project will investigate whether Active Inference relevant measures can predict clinical outcomes in patients receiving chiropractic or osteopathic care for low back pain. It will examine whether baseline factors such as treatment expectations, catastrophising, therapeutic alliance, interoceptive accuracy, autonomic flexibility, and susceptibility to contextual modulation of pain are associated with later improvements in pain and disability.
In addition, it will explore whether early changes in key variables, particularly expectations, alliance, and threat-related cognition might help explain why some patients improve while others do not. The overarching goal is to develop a theory-driven, clinically interpretable framework for understanding outcome variability and, ultimately, to inform future stratified or precision-informed approaches to musculoskeletal care.
The project is based in the Centre for PAIn Research (HSU Centre for PAIn Research | Health Sciences University) and is embedded within a growing research program spanning, theoretical, clinical and experimental research.
Supervision is provided by an experienced multidisciplinary team with international links. Applications are welcomed from UK and international candidates with backgrounds in health sciences, psychology, neuroscience, rehabilitation, or related fields, who are excited by theory-driven research with real-world clinical relevance and are keen to develop advanced skills in mixed-methods research, pain science, and predictive modelling.
HSU is offering up to three fee waivers for UK home applicants starting in October 2026. All eligible UK home applicants will automatically be considered for fee waiver support, which is awarded competitively based on the excellence of the candidate.
International applicants are unfortunately not eligible for fee waivers.
All applicants are expected to have financial plans in place to cover their studies and should not rely on a fee waiver.
Self-funded students are also welcome to apply for this project. Self-funded students can be UK home students or international students.
Available to both UK and International students
Professor David Newell
Dr Solomon Segal
Dr Oliver Thomson
Dr David Hohenschurz-Schmidt
Associate Professor Søren O’Neill, University of Southern Denmark (SDU)
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