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 project offers a unique opportunity to merge artificial intelligence (AI), acoustics, and active sound control. It aims to develop ground-breaking AI-based technology that predicts the sound at the ears of car occupants using signals from microphones placed elsewhere in the vehicle, ultimately enabling localized active sound control within the car interior.
This exciting PhD project explores the use of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to model complex environmental flows. By integrating AI with fluid mechanics, it aims to enhance simulations of the 2D Shallow Water Equations for applications in flood prediction, infrastructure design, and sustainable water management.
Developing effective, inexpensive systems for stroke rehabilitation is an urgent, worldwide problem. This project will develop rehabilitation systems that use functional electrical stimulation (FES) to artificially activate muscles via surface electrodes placed on the skin. You will design the controllers and test them with patients in collaboration with physiotherapists and clinicians.
This project explores designing responsible child-robot interaction using LLMs, focusing on ethical, safe, and developmentally appropriate approaches. It integrates participatory methods with technical frameworks like multimodal LLMs and RLHF to co-create guidelines, prototypes, and policy recommendations that support trustworthy, child-centric AI systems in educational, therapeutic, and domestic contexts.
Health technologies play important roles in earlier prediction of illness and enabling behavioural interventions to help manage conditions in the community. Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) provides essential data to these processes. This project will develop more frictionless interfaces to the collection of EMA data to support a range of interventions.
Respiratory diseases develop progressively; however, current monitoring methods are unsuitable for long-term continuous monitoring. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) uses light to interrogate the optical properties of tissue. This project aims to develop a wearable system for long-term respiration monitoring using NIRS powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to aid in analysis.
The project will explore the design and fabrication of metasurface-based optical components using advanced full-wafer fabrication tools available in the University of Southampton cleanrooms and use advanced nanophotonics laboratories for testing.
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.
Aviation is entering a transformative era defined by emerging propulsion technologies, intelligence, and innovations such as quantum technologies. If you are driven to create high-resolution sensing technologies that enable smarter, data-informed decision-making in aviation, this project offers an opportunity to contribute to the next generation of intelligent aerospace systems.
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.
How can we “see” sound in three dimensions? In this project, you will develop intelligent 3-D beamforming methods that fuse advanced acoustic modelling with data-driven learning.
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.
Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) predominantly affects young women and has a profound impact on quality of life. This PhD will advance the design and evaluation of mobile health tools to support patients in self-managing their condition through inclusive, evidence-based, and low-energy digital interfaces.
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.
This PhD focuses on developing deep-learning techniques based on multimodal natural language processing (NLP), including large language models (LLMs), audio processing, computer vision (pose estimation, emotion recognition), knowledge graphs or neurosymbolic models in computational social science, analysing discourse in text/audio/video format, including emotional rhetoric analysis, information extraction, and argument mining.
Artificial intelligence is transforming society but comes with a growing energy and carbon cost. This project will explore new nanostructured materials and device architectures that can deliver brain-inspired computing with radically improved energy efficiency.
The current increase in data generation is expected to reach unsustainable rates by the end of the decade. This has a strong impact on the environment and therefore new solutions are sought after. The project work is to build the most efficient components by developing the next generation of advanced materials to achieve sustainability in AI applications.
A research project within the Doctoral Centre for Advanced Electrical Power Engineering will consider a complex set of plasma phenomena and physical processes taking place during contact opening in DC switches as well as an optimisation of the devices design to extend its applicability for higher currents and voltages.
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.
We are looking for an exceptional candidate to join our team to develop a novel technique to dope transition metal dichalcogenides and investigate their commercial potential by working with our industrial partners, Intel, Graphenea and Grolltex.
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.
The project brings ideas from the observation of "in-context learning" in large language models into quantum computing. The aim is to design transformer-inspired quantum circuit architectures that brings in-context choice of families of measurement operators for shadow tomography. This contributes to hybrid NISQ quantum-classical algorithms.
Develop the next generation of ultralight optical systems for space - including mirrors, membranes, and photonic stacks engineered to harness light in space. This PhD will advance novel designs, materials, and fabrication techniques to create adaptive, deployable, and space-radiation-tolerant reflectors; enabling breakthroughs in space energy and optical infrastructure.
This project focuses on leveraging remote sensing data (satellite imagery and related datasets) to produce high-resolution, low-cost socioeconomic and environmental maps, with a particular emphasis on scalable algorithms rooted in submodularity and combinatorial optimization.
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 |
