The Leverhulme Trust Aural Diversity Doctoral Research Hub
The Leverhulme trust aural diversity doctoral research hub is a funded PhD programme across the University of Salford and University of Cambridge. This webpage is Salford specific, for Cambridge: https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/phd/laura/. We recruited our final cohort this year (2026).
Aural diversity is a new and highly interdisciplinary field and LAURA is the first PhD programme in the world to focus on it. Aural diversity is based on the simple observation that individual and group differences in hearing, listening and responding to sound are common, yet, outside medicine, when sound is produced, controlled, consumed or discussed a “normal” listener is usually assumed.
LAURA students are supervised by a highly diverse range of supervisors drawn from several departments across Salford. Most disciplines involved with sound are represented, including acoustics, anthropology, art, architecture, computer science, education, engineering, English literature, music/music technology, occupational science, psychology, sociology and speech. Students have access to facilities including performance and recording spaces, dedicated acoustics facilities and psychology labs.
About us
The Leverhulme Doctoral Centre for Aural Diversity seeks to disrupt and transform thinking across disciplines by fundamentally reconceptualising hearing to include the whole spectrum of aural experience. Everybody hears differently. Yet, outside medicine, when sound is produced, controlled, consumed or discussed a ‘normal’ listener is usually assumed. People who hear differently, like a musician with tinnitus, a lip-reading churchgoer or an autistic student are marginalised by this assumption. Salford topic areas are linked below, to find out more about the types of topics available at Cambridge see: https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/phd/laura/.
