Are you holding Master’s degree and looking for fully funded PhD positions? Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland invites online application for multiple funded PhD Programs / fully funded PhD positions in various research areas.
Candidates interested in fully funded PhD positions can check the details and may apply as soon as possible. Interested and eligible applicants may submit their online application for PhD programs via the University’s Online Application Portal.
1. Fully Funded PhD Position in Mathematics and Physics
Summary of PhD Program:
This project is concerned with controlled coupling between nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres in diamond and plasmonic nanostructures with the overall goal being to efficiently couple single NV emitters to plasmonic excitations that can also improve optical spin readout efficiencies in a range of applications for the NV centre. Both fundamental and applied aspects of this research will be assessed from the perspectives of quantum plasmonics [1-4]. The project goals include the implementation of experimental and computational tools for developing new NV-plasmonic configurations to improve spin readout efficiencies in a range of applications for the NV centre including higher precision magnetic nano-sensors, with greater bandwidth.
Application Deadline: 30 September 2023
2. Fully Funded PhD Position in Mathematics and Physics
Summary of PhD Program:
The PhD project is concerned with experimental investigations and theoretical studies of chiral coupling phenomena and cooperative interactions between quantum emitters and confined optical modes supported by various nanophotonic waveguide configurations, with the overall goal being to efficiently couple the spin of the quantum emitter and the helicity of the waveguide mode that can also be coherently coupled with multiple emitters embedded in the waveguide. Both fundamental and applied aspects of this research will be assessed from the perspectives of chiral quantum optics [1-3].
The project goals include the development of experimental and computational tools for chiral and topological nanophotonic waveguides, realization of collective coupling in chiral nanophotonic waveguides, and contribution to further progress in understanding of fundamental physical phenomena involved in light-matter interactions at nanoscale.
Application Deadline: 30 September 2023
Follow FellowshipBard for daily updates!
3. Fully Funded PhD Position in Natural and Built Environment
Summary of PhD Program:
The overall aim of the project is to further develop the ISC to facilitate it’s use for connecting various steel elements (e.g. column-column, column-beam) with a particular emphasis on rapid assembly, disassembly, and robotic assembly. Achieving this overall aim requires developments in a number of key areas (1) physical assembly & testing (2) Robotics including computer vision and machine learning.
Application Deadline: 30 September 2023
4. Fully Funded PhD Position in Natural and Built Environment
Summary of PhD Program:
The aim is to develop a performance designed mortar and robotic placement system using low carbon non-flammable binding materials to work with 3D mortar placing robotic systems. The mortar should have the following performance features, (1) viscosity and flow control for printing, (2) controlled setting time to allow for machine and manual finish, (3) non-combustible ingredients, (4) desired plasticity for handling and in service performance, (5) durability of 50 years in urban and aggressive marine environments, which make the project highly challenging and rewarding.
Application Deadline: 30 September 2023
5. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics
Summary of PhD Program:
This project aims to secure unified traffic management (UTM) against security risks from known and unknown adversaries that seek to compromise authentication and authorisation across various services, including cloud platforms in UTM. The project will identify vulnerabilities in the existing UTM system and mitigate them by proposing novel methods built into a framework that can reduce the impact of adversaries on the system. The proposed framework will further include features of safety and risk mitigation protocols, which can prolong the security of the UTM systems and make them resilient against cyber threats. The research will advance the state-of-the-art to make original contributions with feasibility studies conducted through a simulated/emulated environment and a UAV testbed.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
6. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
In this PhD project, we aim to define the principles of cyber-defensive deception amongst UAVs using logical reasoning and understand the impact of detecting adversaries in autonomous aerial networks. We plan to form defence mechanisms against threats that evolve continuously and understand the evolution of potential hazards in aerial networks and how the defence mechanisms perceive these. We aim to identify the points of threat exploration subject to proactive and reactive defence methods and list the best possible strategy with their impact study and conditions of operations for autonomous aerial networks.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
7. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
When a single isolated reconnaissance attempt is observed it would look like a rare but legitimate network activity. If this innocent looking rare activity starts happening in different ports or wider time windows, that could be an indicator of a malicious reconnaissance activity. Considering today’s data centre network traffic exceeds 100Gbit/s, analysing the packages on the fly for malicious rare threats over a long period of time becomes a challenging problem.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
10 Best AI Cover Letter Builders
8. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
Cyber attack attribution involves minimising uncertainty on three levels: the tactical/technical level – understanding the incident primarily in its technical aspects; the operational level – understanding the attack’s high-level architecture and the attacker’s profile; the strategic level – understanding the motives and goals of the threat actor, sponsors and associates[1]. Determining the intrusion mechanism can be done on a technical level by investigating forensic artefacts. However, the question of motive requires strategic analysis (non-technical by definition) from the operational layer in a geopolitical context[1].
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
9. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
Current approaches to malware detection using machine learning are based on supervised learning approaches i.e., a machine learning system is trained using a large dataset with examples of malware and clean programs. However, collecting a large, labelled malware dataset is an expensive and time-consuming process. Furthermore, as new malware is constantly discovered online, malware detectors trained in the traditional way quickly become obsolete. The process by which the distribution of malware changes over time is known as concept drift [3].
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
10. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
This project is funded through the CSIT Doctoral Training Programme. The scholarships are fully funded, with an additional stipend for 42 months and an industrial top-up worth £30k per student. You will also benefit from the opportunity to be considered for a 1-to-3 months placement in industry with one of our partners, as well as enhanced training in leadership, professional skills and much more.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
11. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
The broadcast nature of the wireless medium makes it hard to eliminate unauthorised access to wireless networks. A typical secrecy problem in a wireless communication system involves three nodes: the transmitter, the receiver- er, and the eavesdropper. The transmitter wants to communicate with the intended receiver but does not want to let the eavesdropper learn its secret message. The eavesdropper is assumed to be passive; hence, its location is unknown to the transmitter and receiver. Perfect secrecy is achieved when the transmitter delivers a positive information rate to the legitimate receiver and ensures that the eavesdropper cannot obtain any information.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
12. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
In the asymmetric PAKE or aPAKE in short, the user saves the password, say pw, and no more information and server saves H(pw) and no more information on password. This approach is vulnerable to precomputation attack. Considering a hardware-secure-module (HSM) in the serverside may improve the situation where the server saves the H(pw) in HSM and all computations involving H(pw) are performed inside HSM. Though this makes the protocol free from precomputation attack, however this is not commercially viable owing to huge number of clients aiming to server for authentication at the same time and in turn trying to use the same HSM.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
13. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
Record linkage is the technique which aims to link the records from two or more distinct sources. This has been commonly adopted in biomedical informatics to link electronic health records (EHRs) of the same patient in different medical institutions, e.g., for building the longitudinal health profile of the patient or for de-duplicating individual records in multiple databases, etc. Due to the concerns of patients’ confidentiality and/or the institutional data sharing policy, the patient records, in particular the identity keys (e.g, the patients’ name, SSN, address, etc), cannot be directly shared with the other party.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
14. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
Data-driven approaches such as Machine Learning (ML), and especially deep neural networks are computationally intensive systems, and suffer from privacy leakage threats such as vulnerability to Membership Inference attacks and Property Inference Attacks. On the other hand, new brain-inspired neuromorphic architectures such as Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have shown state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of applications with promising characteristics. SNNs emerged as an attractive alternative to classical ML systems, due to their biological plausibility and similarity to the human brain’s functionality.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
15. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
Intelligent spacecrafts that use Machine Learning to ensure autonomous exploration would be very useful for exploring new parts of the Solar System and reducing mission costs. The explicit need for adaptability, reasoning, and generalization from past experience provides a prime opportunity for the field of ML to be deployed in such systems. However, Space missions operate in an extremely challenging and aggressive environment. In fact, soft errors such as Single Event Upset (SEU) and Single Event Transient (SET) which are typically caused by high energy cosmic particles striking electronic devices are significantly present in the space environment.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
16. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
In this PhD project, we will focus on designing novel and low-cost signal processing schemes and resource allocation algorithms to improve the security, while maintaining the quality of service for the IoT wireless systems. IoT is expected to be one of the key elements of next generation (beyond 5G and towards 6G) wireless systems. Thus, the research outputs of this project will be of high impact to both academia and industry. The students working on this project will have chances to collaborate with big research groups who are developing new technology for beyond 5G wireless systems.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
17. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
In this PhD project, we will focus on the design of cell-free massive MIMO including the machine learning techniques together with signal processing algorithms to ensure reliable and secure communications. Cell-free massive MIMO is expected to be one of the key technologies for next generation (beyond 5G and towards 6G) wireless systems. Thus, the research outputs of this project will be of high impact to both academia and industry. The students working on this project will have chances to collaborate with big research groups who are developing new technology for beyond 5G wireless systems.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
18. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
Identity-based encryption is a type of encryption that uses some form of the identity of the user to simplify the key management process and procure a public key. This aids key distribution and is useful in public key infrastructures. Identity-based cryptography is currently used in UK emergency services communications (MIKEY-SAKKE, IETF RFC 6509) and may be suitable for lightweight applications, offloading computations to a central key management system. Recently, there is a transition in public key cryptography to post-quantum cryptography, that is alternative families of cryptography that provide security against known attacks by possible future quantum computers.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
19. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is an exciting, advanced type of encryption, which allows computations on encrypted data, without use of a decryption key. Introduced in 2009, such a powerful encryption tool enables privacy-preserving data analysis, however HE suffers in terms of performance due to high computational complexity and particularly memory management demands. Hardware acceleration and optimisation of homomorphic encryption has demonstrated successful speed up factors of over 100x for homomorphic encryption.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
20. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
In the last decade, various advanced computing system, including supercomputers, ubiquitous computing centers, and servers, have been developed and widely deployed. Unfortunately, Moore’s law is approaching its limitation, and conventional computing techniques are not effective in providing further performance enhancement under physical restrictions. One of the most promising directions to explore is to focus on a suitable reduction of the computational accuracy without sacrificing functionality and ‘’perception’’. This approach is known as approximate computing. Inspired by the fault-tolerance capability of the human brain, approximate computing can accept errors in the calculation without affecting the results of certain human perception and recognition-related computation, such as artificial intelligence (AI), (deep-) machine learning (ML), and signal processing, in which noisy data, redundant information, and inaccurate results are tolerable for the computation.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
21. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
There are many challenges in implementing security in the hardware domain. Hardware designs are complex making it easy to conceal malicious elements within them. The myriad of complex attacks against hardware are difficult to investigate, requiring high expertise and specialised equipment. When issues are found they can be difficult and expensive to resolve. Due to this, the hardware supply chain is extremely vulnerable to various security attacks, e.g., overproduction, counterfeiting, reverse engineering, hardware trojans, etc. In 2019, the UK government reported that the annual loss to the economy through counterfeiting and piracy is £9bn.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
22. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) relies on its unclonable variation in manufacturing process to generate a unique unclonable digital fingerprint and is used to identify the connected devices. Even though it’s work relies on unpredictable variations and working environment, some research shown that its operations are model-able. This project aims to apply machine learning based side-channel analysis (SCA) to build a model for strong PUF, and so achieves high accuracy for challenge-response pair prediction for strong PUF in the context of working environment.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
23. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
In this project, the student will develop novel computer architecture required to support the security protocols proposed and/or standardized by CCSDS and will also propose new protocols. The student will also work on Software defined Satellite networking to enable programmability and reconfigurability of the system. The work will involve design of novel computer architecture and/or novel operating system and/or novel multiparty security protocol.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
24. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
Industrial control systems (ICS) operate critical infrastructures, such as railway networks, gas and electricity grids. Although these systems perform critical functions, many still use legacy embedded systems to perform their tasks. An ICS operator can connect commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices to the ICS network directly through USB or serial connection or remotely through a virtual private network. For example, an electricity utility company may depend on its staff to use their hand-held devices to install or maintain (e.g. troubleshooting) smart meters. COTS devices are usually internet connected devices and hence, can be compromised by an attacker. Such compromised COTS device can be used to launch attacks on legacy embedded systems and its ecosystem.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
25. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
The number of space-based entities and missions is showing exceptional increase. The range of use-cases include users to connect businesses and communities around the world, to provide communications, surveillance, weather, and navigation in mission-critical situations. The longevity of satellites and their associated infrastructure along with the difficulty of changing anything after the launch requires long-term public key cryptography security solutions. Since the foreseeable breakthrough of quantum computers represents a risk for the traditional secure communication paradigm used today, novel Quantum-resistant cryptographic schemes need the immediate attention of the cryptographic community, especially of long-term use cases like satellite communications.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
26. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
The security infrastructure we rely on today is considered broken when a scalable quantum computer is successfully realized. Consequently, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in USA initiated a call develop and standardize of new post-quantum cryptography (or PQC also called quantum-resistant cryptography) schemes replacing established public-key mechanisms (NIST PQC). After 3 competitive rounds, the initial 69 submissions have been reduced to 4 winner candidates in 2022 and 4 moved forward to round 4. As PQC is supposed to replace modern public-key schemes in the near future, it will only be considered as a feasible alternative if its constructions can be similarly efficiently implemented on many of the embedded processors existing in today’s digital and pervasive environment.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
27. Fully Funded PhD Position in Natural and Built Environment
Summary of PhD Program:
This project aims to develop a high Technology Readiness Level (TRL) solution using digital twins and AI technologies to enhance the performance of existing buildings, with the ultimate goal of reducing operational carbon emissions. Throughout the course of the PhD journey, you will conduct an investigation into existing solutions that utilize digital twins for existing buildings and cities, while also identifying the challenges that arise during implementation.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
28. Fully Funded PhD Position in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Summary of PhD Program:
This project aims to secure unified traffic management (UTM) against security risks from known and unknown adversaries that seek to compromise authentication and authorisation across various services, including cloud platforms in UTM. The project will identify vulnerabilities in the existing UTM system and mitigate them by proposing novel methods built into a framework that can reduce the impact of adversaries on the system. The proposed framework will further include features of safety and risk mitigation protocols, which can prolong the security of the UTM systems and make them resilient against cyber threats. The research will advance the state-of-the-art to make original contributions with feasibility studies conducted through a simulated/emulated environment and a UAV testbed.
Application Deadline: 15 September 2023
29. Fully Funded PhD Position in Business School
Summary of PhD Program:
This project takes place within Queen’s Management School located at Riddel Hall in Belfast, offering world-class research facilities. As a member of the prestigious Russell Group of research-intensive universities, Queen’s University Belfast has an outstanding reputation and tradition for research excellence. QMS is one of UK’s leading Management Schools. The School has an excellent track record in research. QMS has a vibrant PhD student community and a broad international network of academic support. The successful candidate will be supervised by Professor Niall Cullinane and Dr Ruth Reaney. Apply online and enter the text “QMS2023MGT/SCM” into the funding field. Informal enquiries may be directed to: Professor Niall Cullinane The University is committed to an Equal Opportunities Policy.
Application Deadline: 31 August 2023
30. Fully Funded PhD Position in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Summary of PhD Program:
This exciting PhD opportunity is a collaborative studentship between Queen’s University Belfast and the Office for National Statistics. You will be supervised by Dr Gemma Catney (QUB) and Sarah Wood (Ethnicity, National Identity, Language and Religion Topic Lead, Office for National Statistics). The publication of 2021/22 Census data represents a unique and important opportunity for research that seeks to understand societal change at the local level. This project aims to provide timely and impactful evidence on the ways in which ethnic and religious diversity has grown and been shaped, and the nature of the differing – and persistently unequal – neighbourhood experiences of people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, responding to pressing policy, political and public concerns, and scholarly questions in need of urgent attention.
Application Deadline: 31 August 2023
31. Fully Funded PhD Position in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Summary of PhD Program:
The aim of this project is to develop new polymer materials and manufacturing processes to produce future recyclable, thermoplastic Type IV hydrogen storage vessels. This will be achieved by systematically developing demonstrator prototypes from a range of tailored thermoplastic polymer liners and thermoplastic polymer fibres to showcase the potential to establish this cutting-edge hydrogen gas storage technology. This has the potential to fundamentally change, significantly improve and ultimately revolutionise rotomoulding and the manufacturing practices for Type IV hydrogen tanks. However, they need to be proven as technically and commercially viable.
Application Deadline: 31 August 2023
32. Fully Funded PhD Position in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Summary of PhD Program:
This PhD project aims to investigate and improve the electrode/electrolyte interface. The application of post-treatments of the carbon felts, using oxidative activation combined with surface-decoration with nano-electrocatalysts, is expected to yield significant improvements in the electrochemical reversibility and to lower activation overpotential, resulting in higher battery efficiency. The project aims to focus particularly on iron and vanadium-based electrolytes consisting of metal complexes with ligand systems that have so far not been investigated in terms of their electrode / electrolyte interactions. These chemically activated electrodes will be investigated using various in-situ, ex-situ and operando spectroscopic techniques (Raman, FTIR, XPS, EPR) to provide insight into the underlying activation mechanisms.
Application Deadline: 31 August 2023
33. Fully Funded PhD Position in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Summary of PhD Program:
Today, there is a reliance on computer-based models to support critical design and operational decisions across multiple sectors, and such simulation models are commonly used for a range of purposes within bus vehicle design including prediction of onboard energy consumption and design energy management strategies through to understanding structural and thermal responses. However, the emergence of digital twins has the potential to offer much more insight into the real time behaviours – these models go beyond the standard numerical model and introduce proxy version of the physical system built from a fusion of data with models of differing fidelity, using novel techniques in uncertainty analysis, model reduction, and experimental validation.
Application Deadline: 31 August 2023
34. Fully Funded PhD Position in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Summary of PhD Program:
The move to electrified vehicle powertrains in the bus sector has seen increasingly complex supply chains emerging with more uncertainty around the sources of risk than ever before. This PhD will investigate the impact of external factors on the UK bus sector supply chain, develop new methods for quantifying global supply chain risks and create a decision making framework for agile and robust supply chain management. With increasing global uncertainty and rising material costs, the project will deliver new understanding of the sensitivities of the bus sector to external market variations, identify new business approaches to increase resilience of the UK supply chains and enable better informed decisions relative to supply chain management and the development of strategic partnerships across supply tiers.
Application Deadline: 31 August 2023
35. Fully Funded PhD Position in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Summary of PhD Program:
Groups of COTS tools exist to interact with and manage individual aspects of the manufacturing enterprise. However, holistic applications (Engineering Resource Planning – ERP, manufacturing Resource Planning – MRP) can often be limited by a need for customisation to suit the specific needs of individual organisations at a shop floor level where proven in-house processes have been developed over a number of years. At best, poor management of the interfaces between legacy approaches and new COTS, Industry 4.0 compliant systems, results in process delays and in-accuracies. This applies to tracking progress across contracts and between locations, understanding / predicting accurate time and cost parameters across product ranges, improving communications and organisational learning across the enterprise.
Application Deadline: 31 August 2023
36. Fully Funded PhD Position in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Summary of PhD Program:
To meet emerging sustainability and product performance goals, engineers need revolutionary design tools. The “Re-imagining Engineering Design” (RIED) Programme sets out to explore a radical new engineering design system using bio-inspired methodologies. A crucial aspect of this new design system is the ability to generate concepts rapidly and simulate their performance in parallel as the design evolves. This requires revolutionary simulation capabilities, with are highly automated, adaptive and efficient. This PhD project will look to investigate these new approaches, integrate them into emerging design tools and demonstrate them on a range of products. The PhD candidate will work in a large project team which consists of three universities and 20+ researchers.
