Join over 500 researchers working with industry and government to address some of the problems facing the world today.
Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is the leading university department of its kind in the UK. We were on of the first universities to be named an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Education (ACE-CSE) by the UK government.
Our research is organised around research groups and centres. You'll join one of these groups. This means that specialist academics will always be on hand to hear your ideas and offer help and encouragement. With around 250 staff, ECS has unrivalled depth and breadth of expertise.
You'll have the freedom to run your own project and you'll be supported by a team of supervisors. Direct and regular contact with your supervisors will help you develop your scientific insight, and steer you towards creative and original thinking.
Our graduate school provides training on transferable skills, courses on research methodology, and a working framework to help you settle into a disciplined working routine. You'll also have opportunities to travel to international conferences and events to present your work.
ECS holds an annual careers fair that attracts major companies. The majority of our graduates take up roles in the technology industry or develop their research interests further. If you have a great idea our Future Worlds startup accelerator is there to nurture aspiring entrepreneurs through one-to-one support and its network of investors.
This is our standard 3-year research degree. When you apply, you'll choose one of the following:
SustAI is a multidisciplinary and inclusive doctoral training programme. The CDT will provide 70 fully funded PhD studentships over 5 cohorts. SustAI will equip students with state-of-the-art AI technical skills and a deep understanding of how these skills can be applied to address pressing environmental challenges. Register your interest with SustAI.
A key feature of ECS is that we are truly interdisciplinary. Many of our research groups sit at the interface between electronics and computer science, including cyber security and cyber physical systems. Areas include:
The University of Southampton is pleased to announce that PGR students from EU and Horizon associated countries joining us in 2026-27 will pay the same as UK PGRs for their PhD.
You can either apply for a structured studentship or propose your own PhD idea.
Structured studentships are advertised PhD projects with a title, supervisor, remit and funding already in place. These projects have been set up through collaborations with industry, external partners or they may have been provided through one of several centres for doctoral raining which we take part in.
Taking one of our structured studentships will give you access to additional training, conferences and secondments.
Additive manufacturing (AM) is a computer-controlled manufacturing process, creating 3D objects by subsequent deposition of layers. AM has developed rapidly over the past decade, but there is a lack of work in the field of electrical power engineering, thus the benefits of this revolutionary technique have not yet been harnessed.
Imagine aircraft that never need to land. This project pioneers the science of perpetual flight, developing intelligent control systems that let UAVs harvest energy from the atmosphere to fly indefinitely. Blending AI, reinforcement learning, and adaptive control, you’ll help create resilient, energy-neutral aviation, advancing autonomy, sustainability, and climate-friendly technology.
This PhD explores how AI tools and research techniques, such as algorithmic game theory, AI-supported mechanism design, and agent-based simulation, can help evaluate industrial collaboration opportunities and policy incentives in the circular economy. Working across disciplines, you’ll develop decision-support tools to assess B2B synergies, design smart contracts, and simulate policy outcomes for more sustainable economic transitions.
This PhD project aims to apply frontier advancements in optomechanics to the biosensing and diagnostic fields with the goal to advance optomechanics, mass spectrometry analytics and biophysics towards clinical applications and the fundamental understanding of complex biochemical processes such as the detection of chiral molecules and their relevance for molecular functionalities.
This PhD project will develop reliable and cost-effective on-chip quantum light sources from foundry-compatible 2D materials. Using advanced nanofabrication and spectroscopy, the research will control strain, spin injection, and twist angles to create electrically driven, high-purity entangled single-photon emitter arrays that are crucial for photonic quantum information processing technologies.
You'll explore how principles of quantum information flow and probabilistic entanglement can enhance coordination, adaptability, and resilience in multi-robot systems. The project bridges quantum technologies and embodied swarm intelligence, aiming to create a new class of collective robotic systems that think and act beyond classical limits.
This project engineers the atomic-scale microstructure of Josephson junctions—optimising grain orientation, stress, and interfaces—for longer-lived, reproducible qubits. Students will combine advanced thin-film growth, microscopy, and cryogenic testing to engineer “perfect” quantum hardware.
High-voltage direct current (HVDC) cables are critical for connecting offshore wind farms and renewable energy grids, yet current insulation materials like XLPE are difficult to recycle and prone to space-charge ageing. This project pioneers recyclable polypropylene with engineered materials to overcome these challenges, creating greener, longer-lasting, and more efficient insulation systems.
Tackling climate change starts with transforming our buildings. This project will develop a new toolkit that integrates technologies such as heat pumps, photovoltaics, smart controls, and energy storage, to enable cost-optimal, low-carbon retrofits at scale. Driven by hybrid physics–AI models and real-world validation, it will challenge how buildings save energy and reduce emissions.
Every day, thousands of staff, patients, and visitors travel to hospitals, creating congestion, delays, and emissions. This project reimagines hospital transport through intelligent, shared mobility. You’ll design algorithms for optimal routing, scheduling, and pricing, building simulations that cut costs, reduce carbon, and make hospital travel smarter, faster, and more sustainable for everyone.
Navigational drift is a major bottleneck for systems operating in GPS-denied underwater, space, and subterranean environments. This project advances navigation in such conditions by fusing fast, drift-prone classical inertial sensors with stable quantum measurements. You will develop fusion algorithms, explore sensor configurations, and validate performance through simulation and hardware-in-the-loop testing.
This project will revolutionise electromagnetic defence by creating intelligent surfaces that act as physical neural networks. We will develop metasurfaces that learn in real-time to autonomously counteract jamming, secure communications, and manage sensor signatures, providing a critical advantage in the contested electromagnetic spectrum.
This project will explore recent distillation LLM training (e.g. DeekSeek-R1) for the mental health domain, including human-in-the-loop LLM training approaches such as adversarial training and rationale-based learning. These algorithms will be tested on a case study focussing on robust and safe self-help mental health applications for military veterans.
Inter-disciplinary project to develop novel Large Language Model (LLM) based AI methods for classification of Digital Human Trafficking (DHT) behaviour in social media posts. It will explore human/AI teams for information foraging tasks to deliver a step change in capability for early detection and intervention of DHT into terrorism.
Novel Micro/Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS/NEMS) switches will be developed to significantly reduce overall power consumption of integrated quantum circuits. The MEMS/NEMS switches will be optimised for low temperature operation and will be integrated with existing quantum circuits to evaluate the energy efficiency of the systems.
This project explores the development of a Multimodal Large Language Model that empowers robots to understand and respond to humans through vision, language, and other sensory data. By enabling natural, adaptive, and context-aware communication, the research advances the next generation of intelligent, human-centered robotic systems.
This PhD explores quantum dots and perovskite nanocrystals to create nanoscale optoelectronic devices that mimic functionalities of the biological eye. You will design and integrate quantum-enhanced photonic systems for energy-efficient, high-speed neuromorphic computing and sensing, advancing sustainable and intelligent quantum technologies.
Physical reservoir computing is attracting much attention as a simple and energy-efficient option of neuromorphic computing and our focus is to use Micro or Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS/NEMS) technologies to meet the system requirements of low-power consumption, high device density for high speed processing, and suitable nonlinearity and memory capacity at the same time.
This project explores the emerging field of Quantum Computational Fluid Dynamics (QCFD), combining quantum computing and CFD to simulate nonlinear systems such as turbulence and shockwaves. You will be working and implementing quantum variational algorithms in quantum computers that bridge fundamental physics with quantum algorithmic innovation for next-generation fluid simulation.
The main challenge in the adoption of quantum computing is the gap between algorithmic requirements and current quantum hardware. In this project, you will codevelop novel qubit efficient quantum approaches and techniques that can be used to solve optimization problems and apply them to logistics, pharma, transport, or manufacturing industries.
The main goal is to improve the state-of-the-art mechanisms for the allocation of scare resources from different, and not always compatible, perspectives of efficiency, fairness and resilience. Muti-agent systems and machine learning techniques will be used to develop better and more sustainable mechanisms.
As of now, there are no systematic mechanism that can sustain calibrated level of trust in human-machine teams. The aim of this research is to better understand trust dynamics and build the first prototype of AI-based human-machine system that can autonomously facilitate trust resilience in various situations.
This project involves the development of resource-efficient quantum algorithms for molecular simulation and their implementation in quantum hardware in the cloud or directly with experimental collaborators. Beyond the basic science, applications of the quantum solutions developed in transformative technologies like clean energy catalysts and advanced batteries will also be sought.
Powering the Net Zero future demands smarter, safer AI. This project tackles one of energy’s greatest challenges: ensuring resilient, cyber-secure power systems run by decentralised AI agents. By developing novel methods to detect and prevent unsafe behaviours, you’ll help unlock reliable, renewable-powered grids and shape the future of sustainable, intelligent energy systems.
Pioneer invisible communications technology for defence and security. This PhD will design software-controlled metasurfaces that manipulate signals without radiating energy, creating undetectable, secure data links. You'll develop cutting-edge electromagnetic systems blending theory, simulation, and experimentation to protect critical communications from interception.
This PhD project will explore and develop smart structures, which integrate advanced sensing, actuation and control, with the overall aim of controlling noise and vibration in practical engineering structures prevalent in automotive, maritime and aerospace applications.
This project studies a new hardware paradigm for quantum computing, will theoretically design and experimentally realise a space-time quantum metasurface, a network of dynamically coupled, time-varying qubits. This architecture aims to enable real-time error mitigation and unlock scalable, fault-tolerant quantum processing through emergent collective phenomena.
The aim of this project is to design and pioneer groundbreaking space-time-modulated superconducting metasurfaces to overcome critical quantum computing limitations. This experimental-theoretical PhD will develop dynamic metasurfaces that enable all-to-all qubit connectivity, significantly enhance coherence, and suppress decoherence in next-generation quantum processors, working at the frontier of quantum technologies, quantum computing and electromagnetic engineering.
We offer a wide range of fully funded studentships. We run several of our PhD studentships in partnership with doctoral training centres, meaning you'll benefit from enhanced training and guaranteed funding.
These studentships:
Doctoral training centres offer fully funded studentships which include:
Find out more about doctoral training centres.
In association with the UK joining the EU Horizon Programme, the University of Southampton will be introducing and applying an EU fee waiver for students joining us from EU and Horizon associated countries. This means that PGR students joining us from 2025-26 will pay the same fees as UK PGR students.
See here for full information terms and conditions
We offer scholarships and teaching bursaries ourselves. Your potential supervisor can guide you on what is available.
If you’re an international student you may be able to apply for a scholarship from your country.
Find out more about scholarships
Once you've found a supervisor, they can help you with potential funding sources. We offer match funding in some cases.
You'll need to state how you intend to pay for your tuition fees when you submit your application.
Find out more about funding your PhD
You may be able to fund your postgraduate research with funding from your current employer or from industry.
You can borrow up to £30,301 for a PhD starting on or after 1 August 2025. Doctoral loans are not means tested and you can decide how much you want to borrow.
Find out about PhD loans on GOV.UK
You may be able to win funding from one or more charities to help fund your PhD.
We charge tuition fees for every year of study. If you’re applying for a fully funded project, your fees will be paid for you.
EU Fee Waiver: If your country is part of the Horizon Europe Programme, you will pay the same fees as UK students.
Find out if your country is part of the Horizon Europe programme
2025 to 2026 entry:
| Subject | UK and Horizon programme applicants | International fees |
|---|---|---|
| AI for Sustainability (SustAI CDT) iPhD full time | £5,006 | £26,700 |
| AI for Sustainability (SustAI CDT) iPhD part time | £2,503 | £13,350 |
| Computer science full time | £5,006 | £26,700 |
| Computer science part time | £2,503 | £13,350 |
| Electronics and electrical engineering full time | £5,006 | £26,700 |
| Electronics and electrical engineering part time | £2,503 | £13,350 |
2026 to 2027 entry
| Subject | UK and Horizon programme applicants | International fees |
|---|---|---|
| AI for Sustainability (SustAI CDT) iPhD full time | To be confirmed Spring 2026 | £27,300 |
| AI for Sustainability (SustAI CDT) iPhD part time | To be confirmed Spring 2026 | £13,650 |
| Computer science full time | To be confirmed Spring 2026 | £27,300 |
| Computer science part time | To be confirmed Spring 2026 | £13,650 |
| Electronics and electrical engineering full time | To be confirmed Spring 2026 | £27,300 |
| Electronics and electrical engineering part time | To be confirmed Spring 2026 | £13,650 |
You're eligible for a 10% alumni discount on a self-funded PhD if you're a current student or graduate from the University of Southampton. This will not apply for programmes that are externally funded. Please check the fees and funding section.
Our research takes place in a multidisciplinary, collaborative environment, organised across globally important research groups and national research centres.
We offer 2 doctoral routes:
If you choose our standard research PhD, decide whether to apply to an advertised research project or create your own proposal.
Whichever programme you choose, you'll need to identify a potential supervisor. Therefore it's a good idea to email supervisors working within your field of interest to discuss PhD projects. It's best to do this well ahead of the application deadline.
You’ll find supervisors’ contact details listed with the advertised project, or you can search for supervisors in the staff directory.
As part of your online application, you’ll need to send us:
The application process is the same whether you're applying for a funded project, or have created a research proposal.
You should have a 2:1 honours undergraduate degree or equivalent qualification in a relevant discipline.
If English is not your first language, you'll need an IELTS minimum level of 6.5 with a 6.0 in writing, reading, speaking and listening.
If you are applying for the SustAI iPhD. you'll need an IELTS minimum level of 6.5 with a 6.0 in writing, reading, speaking and listening.
Your awarded certificate needs to be dated within the last 2 years.
If you need further English language tuition before starting your degree, you can apply for one of our pre-sessional English language courses.
Check the specific entry requirements listed on the project you’re interested in before you apply.
Research degrees have a minimum and maximum duration, known as the candidature. Your candidature ends when you submit your thesis.
Most candidatures are longer than the minimum period.
| Degree type | Full time | Part time |
| Computer science PhD | 2 to 4 years | 3 to 7 years |
| Electronics and electrical engineering PhD | 2 to 4 years | 3 to 7 years |
