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 (£23,805 per annum in 2026-27) 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 our 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.

Supervisor: Minh-Son Pham

Dr Pham 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.

Additive manufacturing (AM) is expected to revolutionise the manufacturing industry. However, fabricating reliable and high-performance metals by AM still remains one of the biggest challenges in AM of metallic alloys. Most alloys made by AM have higher strength, but lower ductility compared to those made by other processes. One of the main reasons is because existing alloys currently used in AM were initially designed for other processes (e.g., casting, rolling, etc), not for AM that induces microstructures so much different to those in other processes. Therefore, there is an increasing call to design new alloys that are tailored for AM to help unlock the full potential of additive manufacturing. In this study, the student will assess the printability of existing Ti, Ni, and Fe-based alloys by evaluating their thermodynamic properties, then use amachine learning software, Scikit-learn, to accelerate the search and discovery of new printable alloys. The student will subsequently validate the machine learning prediction by printing selected compositions and provide feedback to improve the learning capability.

Supervisor: Minh-Son Pham

Dr Pham 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.

Meta-materials can achieve new properties thanks to precisely engineering the architecture of internal structures (i.e. meta-structuring) to deliberately control/interact with external signals such as eletromagnetic or elastic waves. In contrast, the metallurgical approach focuses on engineering the natural crystals’ intrinsic microstructure, allowing us to develop metallic alloys with excellent properties and mechanical performance beyond what can be obtained by the alloy composition. Recent advances in material processing, including additive manufacturing, enable precisely architecturing both the metallurgical features (from the chemical composition to phases and crystallographic orientations) and internal physical structures (i.e. meta-structures) to specific locations, providing opportunities to go beyond the meta-structuring. This PhD studentship will explore exciting opportunities offered by this approach, in particular when combining this approach with multi-functional materials to develop high-strength programmable materials. There will be opportunities for collaboration with international teams in the USA, France and Singapore.

Main Supervisor: Dr Sean Collins

This project is not currently available in the departmental competition. Applicants interested in this line of research or for related PhD opportunities should contact Dr Sean Collins (s.m.collins@imperial.ac.uk) to discuss upcoming and additional PhD funding opportunities.

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: Dr Jing Yang

In recent years, machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have emerged as a new frontier for materials modeling. They promise near-DFT accuracy with only a fraction of its cost, thereby significantly expanding the affordable time and spatial scales of the simulation. These developments open new doors for high-throughput materials discovery with more realistic structures and vast configurational space. However, there are still challenges to be overcome to use MLIPs for electrochemical reactions at surfaces and interfaces. The commonly used MLIPs determine the forces and energies of a given atom by its local atomistic environment within a certain cutoff, making the model inherently short-sighted. As a result, these MLIPs fail to capture the long-range electrostatic interaction between charged species, which is key in electrochemical catalysis.

The proposed project aims to develop an MLIP model with explicit control of electrochemical potential and charge state, and to establish a modeling framework utilizing charge-aware MLIP for predicting the thermodynamics and kinetics of electrocatalytic surfaces under explicit control of electrode potential. The project will involve training in electrochemistry, atomistic modeling, high-throughput calculation, and machine learning for materials.

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.

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
• Florian Bouville
• Andrew Cairns
• David Dye
• David Payne
• Mike Finnis
• Robin Grimes
• Peter Haynes
• Sandrine Heutz
• Sam Humphry Baker
• Stella Pedrazzini
• Minh-Son Pham
• Jason Riley
• Eduardo Saiz Gutierrez
• Milo Shaffer
• Stephen Skinner
• Paul Tangney
• Aron Walsh
• Yang Jing
• Alex Porter
• Finn Giuliani
• Mark Wenman
• Martyn McLachlan