Postgraduate Research Studentships 2012: Make your perfect research match at Queen Mary

We are awarding over £10m in studentships to support the most talented and ambitious new researchers. Successful applicants are awarded studentships to cover fees and support living costs in recognition of the vital role that they will play in QM’s lively research community.

Many of the studentships we offer are jointly held by more than one academic school, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the research activity across the university. See studentship details for the specific areas of academic research, including project titles and areas of collaboration, in which our awards are offered.

Queen Mary is part of a small group of elite research institutions in the UK credited to award UK Research Council funding. Studentships are also on offer directly from Queen Mary.

Who can apply

• Our Queen Mary Principal's Studentships are open to UK, EU and international students. They cover tuition fees (at UK/EU rates) and a maintenance allowance of around £15,000 per year
• UK Research Council doctoral training studentships are generally available only to UK and EU students
• Medical Research Council funding is open to both UK and international students; however international students will be expected to make up the difference between UK and international tuition fee rates
• Students from China should take note of our China Scholarship Council collaboration scheme

Application and interview timeline

• 5 December 2011: Deadline for all Barts Cancer Institute applications - interviews will be held later that month.
• 31 December 2011: Deadline for Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry project applications
• 31 January 2012: Deadline for QM's Principal's Studentships and UK Research Council studentships
• 20 January 2012: Deadline for China Scholarship Council (CSC)/ Queen Mary Joint PhD scholarships
• January 2012: Interviews will be held for QM's Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry applicants
• February or March 2012: Interviews for applicants to the Faculties of Humanities and Social Sciences and Science and Engineering

Please note: Candidates may be required to attend studentship interviews in person. The School of Medicine and Dentistry will only conduct face to face interviews in London. Please check with your School before making an application.

How to apply

1. First consult the list of academic subject areas of our awards from the list below. Individual academic school and institute websites will post eligibility criteria along with information about any other details you need to include regarding your previous experience and academic ambition.
2. You are strongly advised to contact the academic school to discuss your application, your chosen subject area and potential supervisor(s). You are able to apply for multiple awards, however only one award per person can be made.
3. Some studentship schemes require additional documentation/ application forms as part of your application. Check with the school for details. This should be completed and uploaded with your formal online application.
4. Finally apply online via our A-Z of research opportunities. Select your proposed area of research, then choose the application form for Semester 1 start (September 2012). Give information on any specific studentship you want to be considered for in the relevant (funding) field in the online application form.

Other sources of funding

A number of additional awards are made throughout the academic year. Check our website regularly for details, as well as findaphd.com, naturejobs.com, postgraduatestudentships.co.uk and jobs.ac.uk.

Queen Mary also runs a generous Postgraduate Research Fund, to which you can apply throughout the year for funding to cover the costs of research trips, or attending conferences to present your work.

Our Studentships are funded both internally and through funding from the following research councils:

Subject areas

Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry

The deadline for these awards will be 5 December 2011 for all Barts Cancer Institute awards - interviews will be in mid-December - and 31 December 2011 for all other School of Medicine and Dentistry awards with interviews in the UK taking place in February.

The following projects are funded under Queen Mary's EPSRC Doctoral Training Account:

• The effect of substrate porosity on fluid shear stimulation of osteocytes

• Development of Type VI collagen hydrogels for skin repair and regeneration

• Process development of nanocapsules as molecule delivery vehicles to study stem cell differentiation

• The Blood Coagulation Network: Exploration of a Biological Complex System

The deadline for these awards will be the 31st January 2012.

For more details please visit: www.smd.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/scholarships2012

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Business and Management

The School is seeking to appoint six fully funded PhD Students; two joint studentships with the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, School of Law, one joint studentship with the School of Mathematical Sciences. We are also offering two fully funded Scholarships, chosen from the Centres listed below:

• The Centre for Research in Equality and Diversity (CRED)
• The Centre for Globalisation Research (CGR)
• The Centre for Management and Organisational History (CMoH)

For more details please visit: www.busman.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/phdprogramme/funding

English

We have a number of awards both individually for research in our core themes and in collaboration with others Schools and external funders. We are making an award in the Early modern textual cultures of Western Europe with the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film and also for Histories of Culture with the School of History.

For more details please visit: www.english.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/funding

Geography

One full studentship in the area of human and physical Geography and also collaboration with the School of History on a studentship for Space Time and Home, and collaboration with the School of Politics and International Relations: Transnational Politics of the Latin American Diaspora: the Bolivian Experience.

For more details please visit: www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/admissions/phdadmissions/funded2011

History

We are pleased to be able to offer:

• three fully funded Queen Mary Principal's Studentships available to support research into any of the schools main areas of expertise.
• two fully funded Arts and Humanities Research Council studentships available to support research into any of the schools main areas of expertise.

We can offer supervision in the areas of late medieval and early modern history; the history of Islam and the Crusades; Jewish history; the history of the emotions; the history of ideas and of political thought; the history of medicine; modern British, modern European and global history.

We also have available a number of dedicated awards:

• the Mile End Studentship in Modern British Political History (offered jointly with the School of Politics)
• a Principal's Studentship on Space, Time and Home run in cooperation with the Home run in cooperation with the School of Geography Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Centre for the Study of the Home
• a Principal's Studentship, Histories of Culture for interdisciplinary research on literature and history (offered jointly with the School of English and Drama)
• a Wellcome Trust funded studentship for research into the broad theme of Medicine, Emotion and Disease

For more details please visit: www.history.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/funding

Law

The Department of Law will offer six PhD studentships at present. All pay fees and a stipend.

• Immigration Control and Counter-Terrorism
• National Archive Collaborative College Studentship
• Department of Law Studentship
• Three Department of Law Graduate Teaching Awards

The Centre for Commercial Law Studies studentships is particularly keen to support studentship applications in the following areas:

• Law and Finance (IP Securitization)
• Consumer Behaviour and the Law (Online Gambling)
• Intellectual Property (Software Patents)

For more details please visit: www.law.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/funding/

Languages, Linguistics and Film

We have a full studentship open to any area covered by the School and a studentship in the area of early modern textual cultures of Western Europe, jointly with the School of English and Drama, and an award for a joint studentship with the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences on Intergenerational psychological and linguistic change in the local British Bangladeshi immigrant community.

For more details please visit: www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate

Politics and International Relations

We have a full award in Politics and International Relations research and two cross-School awards: the Mile End Scholarship in British Political History, joint with the School of History, and a scholarship with the School of Geography on the transnational politics of the Latin American diaspora, focussing on Bolivia.

For more details please visit: www.politics.qmul.ac.uk/research/postgraduatestudentships

Drama

We are pleased to be able to offer:

• one fully funded Principal’s Studentship available to support research into any of the Department of Drama's areas of expertise
• one fully funded Principal’s Studentship available to support research into any of the the School of English and Drama's areas of expertise (interdisciplinary projects are welcome but not essential for candidates to be considered for this studentship)
• two fully funded Arts and Humanities Research Council studentships available to support research into any of Department of Drama's areas of expertise

We can offer supervision across a wide range of topics encompassed by our four main - but overlapping - strands of research, on cultural histories of performance, transnational performance, live art, and applied performance.

For more details please visit: www.drama.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/finance

Economics

Five Teaching Assistant studentships worth £18,000 per anum for 60 hours teaching

For more details please visit: www.econ.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/phd-programme

Faculty of Science and Engineering

Physics and Astronomy

A number of studentships are available for most areas of research within the School.

For more details please visit: http://ph.qmul.ac.uk/phd/phd, as well as: http://ph.qmul.ac.uk/phd/funding-and-applications

The following projects are funded under Queen Mary's EPSRC Doctoral Training Account:

• Understanding charge transport in organic semiconductors using Electron Paramagnetic Resonance

• Towards a new theory of liquids: the nature of local atomic dynamics

• Modelling the structure and dynamics of methane hydrate clathrates

Biological and Chemical Sciences

We have a number of studentships:

• Novel ways of how light reaches and synchronizes the circadian clock of Drosophila
• Role of the PspA protein in maintaining membrane integrity in Escherichia coli
• Systems chemistry: catalytic selectivity controlled by cooperative low-energy dynamics, probed by neutrons, muons and theory
• Creating novel biosensors and self assembly systems as components in synthetic biology
• Developing muon spin spectroscopy to probe electron transfer within proteins

For more details please visit: www.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/prospectivestudents/research/studentships

The following projects are funded under Queen Mary's EPSRC Doctoral Training Account:

• Developing and validating automated assays for zebrafish behavioural analysis and drug discovery

• Finding a needle in a haystack: the regioselectivity problem in C–H activation

• Novel nanomaterials that exploit hair follicles as a new drug delivery route

• A small molecule ionophore therapeutic approach for Alzheimer’s Disease

• Small molecule chemical biology tools for probing metabolite-protein interactions in cancer

Electronic Engineering and Computer Science

The following interdisciplinary projects are funded under Queen Mary's Principal's Studentship programme:

• Formal Mathematical Models for Mid/High-Level Music Prosodic Gestures
  Supervisor: Elaine Chew (Professor of Digital Media, Centre for Digital Music)
  Co-supervisor: Oscar Bandtlow (Lecturer, Applied Mathematics)
• Extreme events in complex coupled systems
  Supervisor: R. J. Harris (Maths)
  Co-supervisor: Raul Mondragon (Networks)
• Network coding "lite"
  Supervisor: Soren Riis (Theory)
  Co-Supervisor: Peter Keevash (Maths)
• In Silico Evolution of Minimal Neuronal Circuits for Concept Learning
  Supervisor: Dr Chrisantha Fernando (Interaction Media and Communication)
  Co-Supervisor: Prof Lars Chittka (School of Biological and Chemical Sciences)

The following projects are funded under the college studentship programme:

• Adaptive Computational Interfaces for Creative Musical Expression
  Supervisor: Andrew McPherson (Lecturer in Digital Media, Centre for Digital Music)
  Co-Supervisor: Elaine Chew (Professor of Digital Media, Centre for Digital Music)
• Ensemble Interaction Over Distance
  Supervisor: Elaine Chew (Professor of Digital Media, Center for Digital Music)
  Co-supervisor: Patrick Healey (Professor of Human Interaction, Interaction Media and Communication)
• SLA-based elastic management of services deployed on a cloud platform
  Supervisor: Félix Cuadrado(Networks)
  Co-supervisor: Prof. Steve Uhlig (Networks)
• Privacy-Preserving Profiling on Home Gateway
  Supervisor: Hamed Haddadi (Interaction Media and Communication)
  Co-supervisor: Steve Uhlig (Networks)
• Active microwave metamaterials
  Supervisor: Khalid Rajab (Antennas)
  Co-supervisor: Yang Hao (Antennas)
• Optimal Measurement In Cooperative Networking
  Supervisor: Maged ELKASHLAN, (Networks)
  Co-supervisor:  John SCHORMANS (Networks)
• Probabilistic Modelling of Temporal Expectations in Music
  Supervisor: Marcus Pearce (Centre for Digital Music)
  Co-supervisor: Matthew Purver (Interaction Media and Communication)

The following projects are funded under NERC Doctorial Training Account CASE awards:

• Developing a novel network-based approach to biomonitoring
  Supervisor: Dr Guy Woodward (School of Biological and Chemical Sciences)
  Co-Supervisor: Dr Athen Ma (Interaction Media and Communication)

The following projects are funded under Queen Mary's EPSRC Doctoral Training Account:

• Automatic Personality Analysis and Assessment
• Game Theory and higher-order computability
• Intelligent Interfaces for Accelerating Intermediate Piano Learning
• Crowdsourced math: doing mathematics on the web
• Formal verification of healthcare information systems
• Towards Domain-Independent Image and Video Representation for Object Identification
• Body Tissue Matched Antenna Arrays For Medical Imaging Applications
• Semantic Audio: Bringing audio signal analysis together with future internet technologies

For more details please visit: www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/phd/funding.php

Engineering and Materials Science

The following projects are funded under the college studentship programme:

• Primary cilia structure and function are regulated by nano-topography controlling stem cell differentiation
  Supervisor: Dr Martin Knight
• Dye Sensitized Solar Cells in Energy Efficient Glazing
  Supervisor: Dr Russell Binions 
  Co-supervisor: Dr Steve Dunn
• Matrix fragment signalling in the development of osteoarthritis
  Supervisor: Dr Tina Chowdhury
• Micro-patterning of peptide-based biomaterials
  Supervisor: Dr Julien Gautrot

The following projects are funded via Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) studentships:

• EPSRC PhD Studentship: 3D microscopic examination of environmental materials
  Supervisor: Dr Andy Bushby
• EPSRC PhD Studentship: Developing application for liquid crystal elastomers
  Supervisor: Dr James Busfield
• EPSRC PhD Studentship: Multi-scale simulation of strain fields in bone grafts to investigate guided bone regeneration
  Supervisor: Dr Karin Hing 
  Co-supervisor: Prof Ante Munjiza
• EPSRC PhD Studentship: Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to optimise the processing of gene chip and microarray data
  Supervisor: Dr M Hasan Shaheed 
  Co-supervisor: Dr Hazel Screen
• EPSRC PhD Studentship: Vibrational energy harvesting with ZnO nanostructures
  Supervisor: Dr Steve Dunn

For more details please visit: http://www.sems.qmul.ac.uk/research/studentships/

Mathematical Sciences

We have a number of Principal's Studentships in the following areas:

• Extreme events in complex coupled systems
• Formal Mathematical Models for Mid/High-Level Expressive Music Gestures
• Scaling laws of high frequency financial data and multiple agent models
• Time-varying networks: mathematical models and applications
• Higher Lie Theory
• Network Coding “lite”
• Non-commutative Iwasawa algebras
• Optimum design for pharmacokinetic sampling and dose-level allocation in Phase II/III clinical trials

The following projects are funded under Queen Mary's EPSRC Doctoral Training Account:

• Permanent based approaches to maximum likelihood estimation in generalized linear mixed models

• Realisations of Graphs as Frameworks

• Subcube Intersection Graphs

• Metamodels in design and analysis of computer experiments

• A lattice ribbon model of supercoiling in DNA

• Non-­linear  perturbations  of  cosmological  models and  black  hole  spacetimes

For more details please visit: www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/prospective-students/phdmphil-maths

Media Arts and Technology

Ten studentships available

For more details please visit: www.mat.qmul.ac.uk