Why choose this programme

Your PhD will be conducted as part of a research group within our School of Sustainability, Civil and Environmental Engineering. You’ll work to create smart and clean urban environments, dealing with challenges such as constraints of space and ageing infrastructure.

By sharing resources with other departments and schools across the University, we can support you in pursuing multidisciplinary and multi-scale research. This spans traditional subject boundaries and enables science-led inquiry to create engineered solutions to industrially relevant problems, both nationally and globally.

What you will study

On this programme, your research will address the need for safe and sustainable environments in which we can all live and work. Your research can be about anything covered by one of our four research centres, or within the wider research interests of the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences.

You’ll be assigned two supervisors who will guide you through your PhD and meet with you at least once a month. Your supervisors will be responsible for your progress, professional development and personal welfare. They’ll also be able to support you with preparing your work for publication and for research seminar presentations.

You’ll normally spend the first few months of your studies exploring the existing literature within your area of interest and establishing the research question you’ll address. After your first year, you’ll take a confirmation exam, and produce a report setting out your research objectives and what you’ve done so far, as well as a plan for how you’ll complete your final thesis. Your final assessment will be on your written thesis, and by a viva examination with both internal and external examiners.

As a research student, you’ll be able to attend our regular research seminars, where you can find out more about what your fellow researchers are working on and try your hand at presenting. We encourage our research students to interact with all our research staff throughout their programmes.