Fully funded Departmental PhD projects (including DLA)

Successful candidates will receive the following financial support for up to 42 months/3.5 years:

• Full funding for home/Overseas tuition fees. (UK, Irish citizens and EU citizens with settled status qualify as home students)
• A stipend aligned with the current UKRI rate (£22,780 per annum in 2025/26) to assist with living costs (this will be reviewed annually and may be increased in line with inflation).
• A consumables fund of £1,000 per annum for the first three years.

1. Applications are only accepted from talented candidates from the UK or who qualify for home fees status. International students are also allowed to apply, but a reduced number of funded positions is available to international students.
2. To apply for a DTP scholarship, you must meet the college entry requirements. Applicants should hold or achieve a Master's degree in addition to a Bachelor's degree with at least a UK Upper Second Class Honours Level.
3. Before applying, candidates must have contacted a supervisor in the Department who has agreed to supervise their research project. You can find a list of available projects below.
4. Current registered Imperial PhD students are not eligible. The scheme is only open to new PhD applications.

There is no specific scholarship application form.  You should submit your application for admission to study at Materials through our online application system, and we will evaluate your application based on academic merit and potential.

When prompted for a personal statement, the applicant should include a 2-page document:

• The first page should be a personal statement (motivations for applying to Imperial and the scholarship, and any other supporting information not included elsewhere on the form that you feel will enhance your application)
• The second page should be the research proposal. The applicant may submit updated versions of this statement if required, following application submission, if shortlisted by the department. The applicant is encouraged to write in the first person. 

1. If applying for the President's Scholarship, you can use the same document.
2. To be considered for this scheme, please confirm in the funding section that you want your application to be considered for the Departmental scholarship.

Candidates meeting or predicted to meet the eligibility requirements will be interviewed by their prospective supervisors who will decide if candidates them for the DTP scholarship. Applications will be reviewed by the Postgraduate Admissions Tutor and the Postgraduate Coordinator.

Candidates are assessed according to the following criteria:

1. Academic excellence - as demonstrated by past academic results and by transcripts, awards and distinctions. Applicants should hold or achieve a Master's degree in addition to a Bachelor's degree with at least a UK Upper Second Class Honours Level.
2. Research Potential - as demonstrated by the candidate’s research experience to date, his/her interest in discovery, the research plan and its potential contribution as described in their personal statement and the departmental justification. 
3. Suitability of candidate - as demonstrated by the strength of references and support from the proposed supervisor.

The performance at the interview, together with the previous criteria, will allow for making a final decision. Successful candidates will receive written confirmation of their scholarship. Any offer of a PhD place will be conditional on the candidate achieving the predicted qualifications.

For the deadlines, there are 3 rounds, please refer to the dates as for the President's Scholarship.

Main Supervisor: Dr Stephen Hanham

Prof. Hanham is offering two exciting potential projects. Applicants may apply to either project, but please note that only one new funded PhD position will be available with this supervisor at a time.

This PhD project will focus on the development of advanced additive manufacturing techniques for fabricating terahertz (THz) system components, including optics, waveguides, resonators, and antennas. The work will explore high-resolution 3D printing methods capable of producing complex geometries with sub-wavelength precision, enabling new design freedoms for future high-frequency systems with applications in communications, imaging and space.

By leveraging the flexibility of additive manufacturing, the project aims to create novel device architectures that are challenging or impossible to achieve using conventional lithography or machining techniques. Particular emphasis will be placed on tailoring device performance through careful control of geometry, surface quality, and material composition.

A key objective of the project will be the formulation and characterisation of novel photoresins with low dielectric loss at terahertz frequencies, addressing one of the major limitations of 3D printed terahertz structures. This will involve interdisciplinary work bridging materials chemistry, photopolymerization science, and THz metrology, with the goal of achieving both low-loss electromagnetic performance and high printability. The successful development of such materials will enable the 3D printing of THz components for future THz systems for communications, radar and imaging.

Main Supervisor: Dr Sean Collins

Molecular crystals are components of critical materials technologies from organic solar cells, pharmaceuticals, and energetic materials (e.g. propellants). Yet relatively little is understood about the nature of their defects, like dislocations or grain boundary structures—features of materials' microstructure with outsized impact on their macroscopic properties. Moreover, many crystal structures (and especially polymorphic variants) remain unknown, particularly in areas like organic photovoltaics (recently breaking through 20% power conversion efficiency), where the leading non-fullerene acceptor components are not readily crystallised in forms suitable for structure determination by X-ray diffraction. This project will advance nanobeam electron scattering to address this gap.

Building on recent work laying the foundations for dislocation analysis in molecular crystals by four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM), this project will explore ways to combine serial crystallography and tilt-series approaches for two- and three-dimensional analyses of molecular packing in crystalline thin films. Scripted approaches to data mining, clustering, and AI techniques will be used to manage the expected data volumes. In turn, electron energy loss spectroscopy will link changes in molecular packing to changes in electronic structure. The project will take state-of-the-art non-fullerene acceptor materials as a starting point, but will also support exploration of wider molecular crystal applications.

Main Supervisor: Prof. Stefano Angioletti-Uberti

Proteins are often called "the workhorse of biology" because they control virtually every biological mechanism. They are also some of the most complex nanomachines ever assembled. While Nature built proteins through evolution and an enormous amount of trial and error, recent advances in AI have revolutionised our ability to describe this system, making it possible to rationally engineer proteins from scratch for a specific functionality. In this project, we will broadly explore this subject, using a combination of AI-based approaches and molecular simulations with the goal of designing new proteins for a variety of interesting applications at the intersection between biotechnology, nanomedicine and materials.

Explore some of the most recent work on this subject in our group here:

1) Làla, Al-Saffar and Angioletti-Uberti et al, BAGEL: Protein Engineering via Exploration of an Energy Landscape, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.05.663138v2.abstract
2) Wu, Trolliet, Rajendran, Làla and Angioletti-Uberti: "Mind the Gap: An Embedding Guide to Safely Travel in Sequence Space", https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.05.663138v2.abstract
3) Github page (with our code for protein design): www.github.com/softnanolab

Main Supervisor: Dr Reshma Rao

Co-Supervisor: Prof Magda Titirici (Chemical Engineering)

The high cost of hydrogen production remains a key barrier to the widespread deployment of green hydrogen technologies. One promising approach to reduce both energy input and production costs involves coupling water electrolysis with the anodic oxidation of organic molecules such as mono/di-alcohols, ethylene glycol, glycerol, 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), and light olefins like ethylene and propylene. These reactions can significantly lower the cell voltage, enhance energy efficiency and enable co-generation of hydrogen and value-added chemicals. However, integrating organic oxidation reactions into electrolyser systems introduces new challenges in catalyst design, particularly regarding activity, selectivity, and long-term stability in complex electrochemical environments. This PhD project aims to uncover the mechanistic pathways and material behaviours that govern these hybrid electrochemical systems, with a focus on nanostructured and thin film electrocatalysts.

The successful candidate will undertake a comprehensive research program involving:

• Synthesis and characterization of advanced electrocatalysts, including transition metal-based nanomaterials and thin films.
• Electrochemical benchmarking of catalyst performance under various operational protocols, with comparisons to literature-reported systems.
• Operando spectroscopic studies and mechanistic investigations, including optical spectroscopy, X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), to monitor structural and chemical changes and surface-enhanced infrared absorption spectroscopy with attenuated total reflectance (SEIRAS-ATR) to probe reaction intermediates and pathways during organic oxidation.
• Product quantification and selectivity analysis using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and ion chromatography–mass spectrometry (IC-MS).
• Post-cycling surface analysis using advanced tools such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and atomic force microscopy (AFM), available at the Department of Materials, Imperial College London.

This project will contribute to the development of low-voltage, high-efficiency hydrogen production systems and advance the field of green electrosynthesis by enabling selective conversion of organic feedstocks into valuable chemical products.

Main Supervisor: Dr Sam Humphry-Baker

The development of advanced shielding materials is critical to the deployment of fusion energy. Tungsten boride ceramics have recently been identified as prime candidate materials, but their high sintering temperature currently prevents metre-scale builds from being deployed. Their high brittleness also inhibits the shield from playing a structural role. This project will design and fabricate a new class of tungsten boride composites reinforced with a metallic phase to improve their fabricability and mechanical performance. Relationships between the sintering parameters, the composite microstructure, and the resulting properties will be systematically investigated. The student will use advanced microstructural characterisation tools such as electron-backscatter diffraction and dedicated high-temperature sintering and mechanical testing rigs within the Centre for Advanced Structural Ceramics (CASC). They will work collaboratively with other group members to assess the irradiation damage performance of materials developed, and with fusion reactor constructors in the UK to understand how the composite microstructure affects its neutron shielding performance.

Main Supervisor: Prof Paul Tangney

Phonons are collective oscillations of a crystal's nuclei, which play a central role in fundamental materials physics. For example, they mediate phase transitions and superconductivity, and help to determine a crystal's electrical resistivity and thermal conductivity. At low temperature (T), they are described accurately by perturbation theories, and in studies of transport phenomena, they are often described as a gas of quasiparticles that scatter from one another. However, these descriptions become unrealistic when the simplifying physical assumptions on which they are based  (e.g., T is low and phonons are almost harmonic) break down.

Furthermore, phonon gas models and perturbation theories are fundamentally incompatible with one another: The latter treat phonons as collective vibrations of an entire crystal, whereas the former treat them as point particles. The reality is that phonons are travelling wave pulses whose sizes, shapes, and velocities vary widely, and change continuously until they die suddenly in a collision or gradually disperse. The problem that this project will address is that we lack a general and rigorous mathematical framework for describing vibrations in materials – one that does not require the material to be a crystal,  the temperature to be low, or a state of thermal equilibrium to exist.

Filling this hole in existing theory has become critically important because the terahertz (THz) gap is finally closing. The term `THz gap' refers to the historical unavailability of detectors and intense sources of electromagnetic radiation in the frequency range occupied by most phonons ( THz to  THz). Now that THz sources and detectors are becoming widely available, rapid progress is being made in experimental studies of vibrations in materials and in the development of terahertz devices. However, theory is lagging behind.

The goal of this project will be to develop a mathematical description of waves in materials, which reduces to textbook phonon theory and the phonon gas model under the appropriate physical assumptions, while being general enough to describe waves of arbitrary shapes and sizes in any solid or liquid – including those excited resonantly by THz radiation.

Main Supervisor: Prof Aron Walsh

Artificial intelligence is providing new opportunities to go beyond the traditional limits of materials modelling, scaling with machine learning force fields and sampling with generative models to explore high-dimensional chemical spaces. This PhD project will combine large-scale chemical space mapping with Chemeleon, a text-guided diffusion model using cross-modal contrastive learning, to generate crystal structures conditioned on chemical knowledge and property targets. By integrating chemical heuristics from combinatorial enumeration with agent-based decision-making, the research will create autonomous workflows that iteratively propose, evaluate, and refine candidate materials. Applications will focus on multi-component systems for energy technologies, with candidates screened using machine learning force fields and high-throughput first-principles calculations. A suitable candidate will have prior experience with Python programming and atomistic materials modelling.

Main Supervisor: Prof Robin Grimes

It is straightforward to model the melting of single-component metals and simple binary compounds such as oxides. Molecular dynamics is good at following the solid/liquid interface as it moves into the solid.  But when the solid has two or more components, phase diagrams tell us that at equilibrium, the solid and liquid have different compositions.  The liquid is dissolving a solid of a different composition.  What happens at the interface?  How do the atomic-scale kinetic processes of diffusion at the interface control dissolution into the viscous liquid?  Despite being poorly understood, this atomic-scale phenomenon controls general processes from solidification in metals processing to liquid phase sintering in ceramics, but also specific issues such as the progression of accidents in a nuclear reactor core.  In this project, we will use molecular dynamics to consider binary metallic systems for joining applications and refractory oxides in the nuclear industry.  We will collaborate with colleagues in the metals processing group at Imperial and the nuclear group at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Supervisors: Prof Cecilia Mattevi and Dr Shelly Conroy

The discovery of long-range magnetic order in atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials beyond graphene is a new emerging field promising for future applications in ultra-compact low-power spintronics, memory technologies and neuromorphic computing. 2D magnets present unique properties; an example is the possibility to control ferromagnetic versus antiferromagnetic order by creating a specific rotation angle between two adjacent crystal lattices in multilayered structures. This project aims to demonstrate newly emerging 2D magnetic materials and the engineering of their functionalities for miniaturised magnetic memories. The 2D magnetic materials will be synthesised via a scalable technique, which is MOCVD (metal-organic chemical vapour deposition), and then they will be characterised using state-of-the-art techniques, including SQUIDs, Kerr spectroscopy and magnetic force microscopy. In addition, Lorentz STEM differential phase contrast (DPC) and cryogenic low-temperature phase mapping will be employed to probe the magnetic domains at higher spatial resolution. Devices for probing the magnetic properties will also be fabricated.

Main Supervisor: Dr Minh-Son Pham

We recently presented a groundbreaking research that leads to a new generation of meta-materials mimicking crystal microstructure found in high-performance metallic alloys (refer to M.S. Pham et al., Damage-tolerant architected materials inspired by crystal microstructure, Nature 2019; 565:305). The design of these new meta-materials is realised by additive manufacturing via 3D printing, offering an innovative way to fuse the metals science and 3D printing to design advanced materials with desired properties. This Phd studentship will explore many more exciting opportunities offered by this approach, in particular when combining this approach with multi-functional materials to develop high-strength programmable materials. The qualified candidate will use various computer software to mimic microstructures found in nature to design new meta-materials that are not only mechanically robust but also adaptive. S/he will use advanced 3D printing and material characterisation techniques to fabricate and study the behaviour of designed materials. S/he needs to team up with other students and effectively collaborate with our key academic and industrial partners in the UK, France and the USA.

Main Supervisor: Dr Stephen Hanham

Prof. Hanham is offering two exciting potential projects. Applicants may apply to either project, but please note that only one new funded PhD position will be available with this supervisor at a time.
 

Recent advances in high-speed electromagnetic solvers and optimisation algorithms are enabling the automated discovery of metamaterials capable of controlling the flow of light. Among these methods, topological optimisation has emerged as a powerful approach for designing the geometry of conducting and dielectric structures to meet specific functional requirements for applications in optics, antennas and lasers.

This project will apply topological optimisation to the design of resonators that confine terahertz waves within volumes far below the wavelength scale. Such extreme light confinement dramatically enhances light–matter interactions, opening new opportunities for the detection of single atoms and molecules. In addition, these resonators provide a foundation for technologies such as MASERs and millimetre-wave oscillators.

The project will investigate the fundamental limits of electromagnetic resonator design and leverage state-of-the-art optimisation techniques in combination with high-performance computing to push the boundaries of terahertz photonics.

Main Supervisor: Dr Felicity Worsnop

Fission power is central to UK decarbonisation and energy security strategies, planned to provide 25% of electricity demand by 2050. Zirconium alloys remain the material of choice for fuel cladding, but in-service degradation causes fuel inefficiency, waste generation and operational interruptions. Alloy microstructures evolve continually in service under combined irradiation, high temperature and corrosion conditions. This results in complex corrosion mechanisms, involving oxide formation and the ingress of embrittling hydrogen. Characterisation of these processes at the required nanometre length scales is particularly challenging.

In this project, you will use electron microscopy, atom probe tomography and complementary techniques to gain new mechanistic insights. Using model Zr–X alloys, we will investigate both conventional (e.g. Nb) and unconventional (e.g. Sb) solutes in corrosion processes. You will (i) establish the alloys’ physical metallurgy and (ii) investigate oxide microstructures resulting from autoclave corrosion, particularly around secondary phase particles. You will benefit from Imperial’s new cryo-characterisation suite, and the project is expected to include opportunities for synchrotron studies. You will work collaboratively with industrial and academic partners to apply experimental results within modelling frameworks. Your work will support the accurate prediction of in-service performance and open avenues for novel alloy design.

Here, you can also find a list of academics eligible as supervisors through the departmentally supported PhD (via DLA or Departmental funding) program. Feel free to contact them even if they don't have a project listed, to check if they are happy to support your application!

• Neil Alford
• Stefano Angioletti-Uberti
• Florian Bouville
• Andrew Cairns
• David Dye
• Mike Finnis
• Robin Grimes
• Stephen Hanham
• Peter Haynes
• Sandrine Heutz
• Sam Humphry Baker
• Mark Oxborrow
• Stella Pedrazzini
• Minh-Son Pham
• Reshma Rao
• Jason Riley
• Eduardo Saiz Gutierrez
• Milo Shaffer
• Stephen Skinner
• Paul Tangney
• Aron Walsh
• Jessica Wade