Our 2025/26 cohort brings together four early-career researchers as the fourth year of ESRC Postdoctoral Fellows at the SCDTP.
At the University of Southampton, Danyang Li is building on her doctoral research into attachment and attribution in romantic relationships, and Sayaka Mikoshiba is developing her sociological work on migratisation and the construction of migrant outsiders. At the University of Portsmouth, Mohamed Ismail Abdul Kader is extending his research into how human movement shapes social perception, and Stuart Lucy is continuing his work on young men’s pathways into the incel community and possible interventions.
This is our fourth cohort of SCDTP Postdoctoral Fellows. Our previous fellows can be viewed here (2024/25), here (2023/24) and here (2022/23).
Danyang Li
ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Southampton
Danyang is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Research on Self and Identity, School of Psychology, University of Southampton. Her fellowship builds on the findings of her doctoral research, which used attachment-related (close emotional bonds with important others) experiments and attribution-related (how people explain causes) principles to better understand romantic relationship quality. Her work contributes to integrating attachment security enhancement with cognitive restructuring techniques — ultimately aiming to help individuals build healthier and more secure relationships.
During the fellowship, Danyang will continue to explore the mechanisms linking early-life attachment experiences to future relationship outcomes. She will also actively seek collaboration with national relationship organisations or online platforms to adapt her newly developed and published Hostile Attribution Bias scale into a practical self-assessment toolkit. This resource will be freely available to both research and clinical communities.
Know more about her work here.
Mohamed Ismail Abdul Kader
ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Portsmouth
Mohamed Ismail Abdul Kader is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Portsmouth, School of Psychology, Sport and Health Science. His research examines how human movement such as walking, dancing, and gesture influences social perception, including judgments of attractiveness, competence, warmth, and threat. Using advanced motion-capture methods, he has developed one of the largest open-access databases of dynamic human movement, enabling interdisciplinary applications in social, evolutionary, and forensic psychology.
Ismail completed his PhD in Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, where he received recognition for his innovative research on dynamic cues and social evaluation. Through his fellowship, he will publish and disseminate this work, extend it to forensic contexts (e.g., threat perception and eyewitness identification), and foster collaborations across psychology, robotics, and ageing research.
Sayaka Mikoshiba
ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Southampton
Sayaka is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Southampton. Sayaka is a sociologist who investigates processes of migratisation, or the construction of some people – and not others – as migrant outsiders. Her work highlights the shared struggles between “citizens” and “migrants” alike, and the need for collective commitments to antiracism and social justice across civil society.
During her fellowship, Sayaka will build on her doctoral research by disseminating her findings widely, including publishing articles in leading academic journals, developing her PhD thesis into a monograph and presenting her work at key sociological conferences internationally.
Working with PublicPolicy@Southampton and the Centre for Higher Education Practice, Sayaka will enhance the impact of her research through public engagement with policymakers and other users of her research. She will also pursue research leadership training in preparation for her next research project.
Stuart Lucy
ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Portsmouth
Dr. Stu Lucy is based in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Portsmouth. His research focuses on the journey young and adolescent men take into the incel community and the possible interventions that can be implemented to assuage this trend.
Stu has published in Men and Masculinities and Routledge handbooks on Online deviance. He is currently working on a solo book, How to Make an Incel, which focuses on his PHD research, a co-authored book reviewing problematic contributions to the field, as well as several supplementary articles spanning sociology, gender theory, and media and communications disciplines.
