Innovation Associate; KTP Associate

The University of Roehampton is recruiting to the role of Innovation Associate (KTP Associate). This is an exciting time for a remarkable graduate to join the team as we play a key role in delivering a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) that aims to enhance and expand an innovative AI-driven workplace wellbeing intervention led by Penumbra Mental Health, one of Scotland's leading mental health organisations.

This intervention is a digital project that uses conversational AI and personalised wellbeing modelling to support employees experiencing stress or mental health challenges to build resilience, autonomy, and a more meaningful working life.

The outcome of the KTP will be to commercially disseminate Penumbra's digital wellbeing model and to improve the mental health of employees nationally by providing access to an evidence-based, adaptive AI intervention. The successful candidate will oversee, deliver, and project manage the technical development, evaluation, and commercialisation processes, while being robustly supported by academics within the University of Roehampton as well as Penumbra colleagues on site.

As such, the ability to demonstrate software engineering, AI development, evaluation, and commercial understanding is important.

As the KTP Associate, you will play a central role in the creation of a new AI-enabled digital platform for workplace wellbeing. This is a rare opportunity to lead the development of a product from the ground up, combining human-centred design, software engineering, and data-driven evaluation to deliver measurable mental health impact  this role, you will translate academic research into a production-ready, privacy-by-design AI-enabled digital mental health platform.

You will contribute to the design of outcome models and ethical data pipelines, lead user-testing with real organisations, and help shape the commercial roadmap for the intervention. You will be embedded within Penumbra Mental Health’s team with day-to-day support, while also benefiting from close supervision, training, and academic expertise at the University of Roehampton.

• Using databases to scope out existing evidence-based literature around AI-enabled digital mental health and workplace wellbeing interventions
• Working with all stakeholders—employees, lived-experience contributors, clinicians, technical partners, and academics—to co-design and refine the AI chatbot, wellbeing logic, user interface, and evaluation framework.
• Developing and implementing inclusive components of the conversational AI system, including scripting, integration of large language models (LLMs), safety protocols, and adaptive personalisation features.
• Implementing the evaluation framework by collecting usability, feasibility, and wellbeing outcome data through a variety of methodologies with employees and organisational stakeholders.
• Packaging the AI-enabled wellbeing model, following iterative testing cycles, so that it can be replicated by employers, wellbeing providers, and other organisations.
• Using Penumbra's network and additional contacts to support the product refinement, dissemination and commercialisation of the I.WOW model as an inclusive, demand-driven digital product with clear quality assurance and evidence-based standards.