We are a group who happily interact with anyone who shares any interests with us. Beyond the more formal interactions listed below, everybody is welcome to attend our group seminars. The most efficient way to get started on a project as listed below is to get in touch by email, g.pruessner@imperial.ac.uk. To tip the gender balance in the right direction, we welcome female applicants in particular. 

UROP

There are always some UROP projects available for undergraduate students to be taken over the summer for about four to eight weeks. Because of their brevity, the projects often have a prominent numerical component. A typical UROP project would be some interesting spatio-temporal stochastic process, often related to a PhD project, to be studied numerically during the first couple of weeks and then analysed using standard and not-so-standard tools for the remainder of the project. UROP students are normally hosted at the Centre for Complexity Science in EEE, where most of the group resides, but this is a question of available space. The formal supervision is usually provided by Dr Pruessner, while the day-to-day supervision is often carried out by a PhD student. UROP students are expected to become part of the group for the duration of their project. Ideally, their work will feed into ongoing research.

Final year projects

MSc and MSci students (typically from Maths or Physics) are encouraged to apply to take a project within the group. Depending on the nature of the project, the supervision may be supported by a PhD student. Depending on the duration of the project and the interests of the student, they can be any mix of numerical and analytical work. Such final year projects may be concerned with a concrete stochastic process, with a conceptional question or with a particular method. Year-long projects sometimes result in a publication, which is a big step towards a successful application for a funded PhD place. Master students ideally carry out their work at the Centre for Complexity Science in EEE, where most of the group is based.

PhD

There are always some PhD projects available, often co-supervised by a collaborator at Imperial or outside. Projects draw on a wide range of subjects, but are usually concerned with a stochastic process in time and space, cast in the language of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Some of the projects deal with fundamental questions, such as return times or effective interaction potentials, others focus on methods, such as the non-perturbative renormalisation group or fermionic field theories, or treat long-standing questions, say in percolation or self-organised criticality. Most of the applied projects are concerned with a form of reaction-diffusion process in biological or bio-chemical systems, for example cell-cell interaction in living tissue or protein-protein interaction within a cell. A number of ongoing projects have a strong experimental component and students are strongly encouraged to immerse themselves in the experimental setup. In some cases, the biological question serves only to motivate a more general question in non-equilibrium physics.
 
Depending on the type of project, PhD students are normally based at the Centre for Complexity Science in EEE (Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus), in Huxley (Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus) or, normally part-time, on site with the collaborator, such as at the Francis Crick Institute. There is a large, welcoming and very active group of students at the Centre for Complexity Science, which new PhD students normally find easy to integrate with.
 
To enquire about available projects, please email g.pruessner@imperial.ac.uk. PhD funding is often the most difficult hurdle to overcome. Early enquiries, a year ahead of the envisaged starting date, which is by default October, are strongly encouraged.