About us:

Our Centre for Society and Mental Health is a cross-Faculty initiative between the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy (SSPP) and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN).

Our Centre entre aims to better understand the complex interrelationships between society and mental health as a basis for developing effective policies and practices to promote better mental health, with a commitment to:

- Ensure that the impact of social context is central to how we understand mental health;

- Work in partnership with affected communities.

Effective communication to a wide range of audiences is essential to this.

We are recruiting a Communications Manager to lead diverse and engaging communications, build meaningful partnerships and promote the Centre’s work to a wide range of audiences. If you are passionate about communicating impactful mental health research, the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health would love to hear from you.

About the role:

This role focuses on leading and delivering high-quality communications to promote the Centre’s research, activities, and impact across a wide range of audiences. The postholder is responsible for creating engaging and accessible content, including news stories, blogs, newsletters, lay summaries, and multimedia outputs such as animations and video. They will also support the development of press releases in collaboration with Faculty colleagues and coordinate key outputs such as the Centre’s research briefs series.

A key aspect of the role is managing the Centre’s digital presence. This includes overseeing and growing social media channels—particularly BlueSky and LinkedIn, as well as refreshing and maintaining the Centre’s website to ensure content remains current and aligned with the organisation’s tone and ethos.

The postholder plays an important role in planning and delivering events, including seminar series, primers, and ad hoc activities, ensuring they are well-organised and effectively promoted.

Collaboration and relationship-building are central, with the role acting as an ambassador for the Centre by developing links with partners, third sector organisations, policymakers, and the media.

The role also requires meaningful engagement with experts-by-experience and affected communities, ensuring inclusive and collaborative approaches. A strong commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion underpins all aspects of the work, with active contributions to related initiatives and charter commitments.

This is a part time post (28 hours per week), and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 30/04/2028.

About you:

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1. A first degree or equivalent experience.
2. Excellent communication skills, including experience of promoting and disseminating research findings to a range of audiences.
3. Experience of supporting and coordinating research-related engagement activities, including development of briefs and similar dissemination outputs.
4. Experience of organising events such as workshops, seminars and conferences.
5. Experience of website maintenance, editing and content creation using Contensis or similar content management systems.
6. Experience of creating accessible content for social media channels and using content creation software such as Canva or AdobePro.
7. Demonstrable commitment/interest in supporting research to have real-world impact and influence beyond academia.
8. Proven consistent ability to meet tight individual and group deadlines and to manage one’s own workload through effective prioritising, time management and organisational skills.

Desirable criteria

1. Demonstrated ability to communicate challenging potentially upsetting content in a sensitive and accessible way.
2. Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with research teams and people with lived experience, including good interpersonal skills to develop and maintain effective working relationships.
3. An interest in the area of society and mental health.
4. Relevant previous experience of supporting interdisciplinary research projects.
5. Good science writing skills.

Further information:

At King’s, we believe that the diversity of our community and a culture that is welcoming, open, inclusive and collaborative, are great strengths of the university.

The Equality Act of 2010 protects the rights of our students and staff and provides a framework to fulfil our duties to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and in addition, to advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between those who share a protected characteristic and those who do not. At times, this will include balancing rights and beliefs that can feel in tension.

We are committed to free speech and to academic freedom, believing that our foundational purpose as a university, is to create spaces where a wide range of ideas, including ideas that are controversial, can be discussed and debated, and where members of our community can express lawful views without fear of intimidation, harassment or discrimination. When engaging in the robust exchange of ideas, we ask that our community is mindful of our Dignity at King’s guidance.

We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the person specification section of the job description. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving rapidly, and we recognise its growing role in professional work. Applicants may use AI tools to support preparation of their application, for example to research the role or structure written responses. However, applications must reflect the applicant’s own work and experience. AI tools should not be used during interviews or assessment activities unless this has been agreed in advance as a reasonable adjustment.

We reserve the right to close adverts early due to the volume of applications we receive. While the closing date may change, all adverts will close at 23:59 to allow sufficient time for applications to be submitted on that day.

We encourage you to apply at the earliest opportunity to avoid disappointment as once we have closed a vacancy you will be unable to submit your application.

To find out how our managers will review your application, please take a look at our ‘How we Recruit’ pages.