Explore our current postgraduate research degree and PhD opportunities.
This PhD project has the potential of significantly improving the fatigue design and maintenance of an aircraft. It is funded by Airbus Operations Ltd through an EPSRC Industrial CASE Award. Fatigue design and fatigue damage estimates are based on many factors such as design and performance assumptions, manufacturing, component material, stress cycle calculations and service conditions.
Investigate the response of the UK fishing fleet to systemic shocks. In this project, you will seek to quantify the influence of Brexit, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine on fishing activity, jobs and profits and fish populations.
A fully funded PhD studentship is available in computational materials discovery, as part of a prestigious international Synergy grant funded by the European Research Council. The project, ‘Autonomous Discovery of Advanced Materials’, aims to revolutionise the way that new materials are discovered by combining computational simulations, robotics and materials synthesis.
In the last decade, nanophotonics has emerged as one of the most important research fields in optics. A tiny nano-object plays the role of a nanoantenna, when excited by a light source, it scatters light in the surrounding environment in one or more directions that depend on its geometry and material. An important issue that has not been fully understood yet is how to control the directionality and power of this scattered radiation. The scope of this PhD project is to advance our knowledge in nanophotonics by designing and fabricating nanoantennas that allow full control of the scattered field at the nanoscale. Single nanoantennas with arbitrary shape as well as arrays of coupled nanoantennas will be designed, fabricated and tested.
The UK supports 85% of the World's chalk streams, but a long history of human modification has resulted in their decline. River and floodplain restoration can deliver a range of societal benefits, but to date our understanding of natural chalk stream ecosystems is limited. This PhD will use a suite of novel approaches to reconstruct natural chalk river and floodplain ecosystems in support of their restoration.
Semiconductor photonics is fast becoming one of the most active areas of research, offering optoelectronic solutions for a wide range of applications not only in telecoms, but also in medicine, imaging, spectroscopy, and sensing. Within this field, a subdivision that is gaining increased momentum is semiconductor nonlinear photonics as the materials display a number of important nonlinear effects that can be used to generate and process signals at ultrafast speeds.
Laser modes with a doughnut-shaped beam profile can have many unique properties, including axially-symmetric polarisation (azimuthal or radial) or orbital angular momentum. As a result, these beams have found use in a diverse range of applications from ‘laser tweezers’ to laser processing of materials. In spite of their attractive properties, generating these beams with the required purity and at high power levels is very challenging.
In this project you will be developing lateral-flow-style tests for in-the-field quantification of macronutrients in seawater, making use of metal-organic-frameworks (MOFs) as the sensing element. MOFs are crystalline porous solids that can be rationally designed as receptors for specific molecules, and the project team has already developed protocols for preparing MOF-based materials for lateral flow devices.
The aim of this project is to use computational modelling in combination with experimental data to improve our understanding of placental antibody transfer, in close collaboration between Engineering and Medicine.
A fully funded industrial studentship is available for research in the area of decentralised and distributed active noise and vibration control. Although active noise and vibration control is now a relatively mature technology, with commercial systems in headphones, cars and aircrafts, it is not straightforward to apply to large-scale applications with widely distributed control sources and error sensors.