Research Fellow - SignGPT

UCL, based in Bloomsbury, is a welcoming, inclusive university situated at the heart of one of the world’s greatest cities. UCL is a top-ranked university in the UK for research in psychology, psychiatry & neuroscience.

DCAL is the leading research centre in the field of Deafness, Cognition and Language in Europe. It is a bilingual centre which brings together leading deaf and hearing researchers in the fields of linguistics, psychology and neuroscience. DCAL researchers study language – its origins, structure, use, development, processes and relationship with cognition, using the unique perspective of deafness and deaf communication.

“SignGPT” is a 5-year project (2025-2030) which brings DCAL together with the Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing at the University of Surrey, and the Visual Geometry Group at the University of Oxford. The project, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), aims to leverage annotated sign language data from the British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus (http://www.bslcorpusproject.org) and other sources to build tools to allow spoken language to be automatically translated into photo-realistic sign language and video of sign language to be translated into spoken language.

About the role

This is an exciting opportunity to work with the UCL/DCAL component of “SignGPT” – a research team led by Prof Kearsy Cormier and Prof Bencie Woll. The team works closely with other collaborators on the project – Lead PI Prof Richard Bowden (University of Surrey) and Prof Andrew Zisserman (University of Oxford) and their teams.

The postholder will provide linguistic expertise to the design of AI tools and assets and will then use these tools to conduct linguistic research. They will also help organise the user community workshops, post news items online, and contribute to writing up of the project findings along with the PI/CIs. The post holder will receive training, support and mentoring as appropriate to the role. The post-holder will be based at the UCL Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL).

• The position is offered for 36 months.
• Appointment at Grade 7 is dependent upon having been awarded a PhD; if this is not the case, initial appointment will be at Grade 6B (salary £40,603 - £43,749 per annum) with payment at Grade 7 being backdated to the date of final submission of the PhD Thesis. To be considered eligible for this post, applicants must have formally submitted their PhD thesis and must either have successfully completed their viva examination or have an agreed viva date scheduled within 3 months of the post’s commencement date.

About you

You will hold a doctoral degree in linguistics or related area (e.g. applied linguistics, corpus/computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, data science) or evidence of substantial relevant research experience in one or more of these areas. You will also have fluent skills in British Sign Language (BSL) or another sign language. You will be based at UCL DCAL and will work closely with other project members at DCAL. You will also liaise regularly with researchers at Surrey and Oxford who will be doing the main technical work.

DCAL particularly encourages applications from deaf and deafblind people for all posts.

Further details

This advert will close on 26 November 2026 at 23:59 GMT. A Job Description and Person Specification can be accessed in the full UCL advert, by clicking ‘Apply’.

Customer advert reference: B02-11573

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