The School of Computing and Engineering offers various scholarship opportunities for Master’s by Research and PhD applicants. All scholarships are awarded on a competitive basis. Below is a guide to our standard process but some scholarship opportunities may have their own processes so it is essential that you read the relevant information for the scholarship for which you are applying.
Prior to starting your application, you should identify a potential supervisor in the School who is prepared to support your application for a scholarship. This can be done by exploring our researchers on Pure and our advertised projects on Coursefinder. Your potential supervisor will also be able to advise you on completing your application.
Applications for scholarship opportunities are made by first submitting an Expression of Interest following which successful candidates will be invited to submit a full application. Please see the webpages below for more information on this process:
The above links and Expressions of Interest form give full details of what is required in order for your application to be considered include the following:
Expressions of Interest are shortlisted for interview based on criteria including:
Therefore, in order to have the best chance of being shortlisted for interview, it is essential that your application is both detailed and complete to highlight all your strengths. If you are shortlisted for interview, we will send you additional information on the next steps.
Unless otherwise stated, we accept applications and award scholarships throughout the year but the final deadlines are:
PGR start date |
Application dates for international and home students with a scholarship |
Application dates for home students without a scholarship |
Sept/Oct 2024 |
07 June 2024 |
28 June 2024 |
January 2025 |
18 October 2024 |
15 November 2024 |
April 2025 |
24 January 2025 |
21 February 2025 |
Fee waiver studentships available to eligible graduates of the University of Huddersfield
Fee waiver studentships available to home (UK resident) students to celebrate the University's bicentenary
Fee waiver studentships available to applicants who meet our standard entry requirements
Fully funded Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) studentships - externally funded
Explore current funded PhD opportunities in optical metamaterials, nanophotonics and instrumentation.
Project Code: Code: SCE_2024_VCS
If you’re a Huddersfield graduate, looking to undertake a full-time or part-time research degree, you may be eligible for a full fee-waiver on your research degree.
The scholarship is open to home and international candidates.
Please note, for international students our Vice-Chancellor's Scholarship Scheme provides a 50% fee waiver on full-time or part-time research degrees.
Our Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship Scheme is a competitive application process and to be eligible, you must have achieved one of the following:
- a first-class honours degree
- a distinction at taught Master’s
or
- be recommended based on your Master’s by Research by your supervisor and academic school
and
- graduated from the University of Huddersfield in the last three years.
Any offer will be conditional on your degree outcome if you are graduating in the current academic year.
Available for research undertaken on a full-time or part-time basis including PhD, Master of Arts by Research, and Master of Science by Research.
Scholarship is only available for the standard registration period only,
For doctoral awards, or PhD, the fee waiver will be for 3 years full-time or 6 years part-time
For Master’s by Research awards, the fee-waiver will be for 1-year full time or 2 years part time.
The fee waiver will not apply to any research undertaken outside of this standard registration period, including any write up period.
The University of Huddersfield reserves the right to vary or withdraw the waiver at any point in future academic years.
Please note, that this fee waiver is subject to availability.
If you have any queries or require further information, please contact study@hud.ac.uk
Applications for scholarship opportunities are made by first submitting an Expression of Interest following which successful candidates will be invited to submit a full application. Please see the webpages below for more information on this process:
The above links and Expression of Interest Form give full details of what is required in order for your application to be considered include the following:
If you have any queries or require further information, please contact sce.research.admin@hud.ac.uk
Project Code: SCE_2024_SCES
School of Computing and Engineering Scholarships are awarded for 100% of tuition fees for the standard registration period only for either PhD or Master's by Research study. Excellent candidates may also be awarded a small tax-free stipend, paid monthly.
Candidates must meet the standard entry requirements for the course for which they are applying.
If you are due to graduate in the current academic year, any offer will be conditional on your final degree outcome.
Reapplications for a scholarship within the School of Computing and Engineering will not be considered within 12 months of a previous unsuccessful application study.
All scholarships are subject to satisfactory academic progress including successful completion of Progression Monitoring.
Applications for scholarship opportunities are made by first submitting an Expression of Interest following which successful candidates will be invited to submit a full application. Please see the webpages below for more information on this process:
The above links and Expression of Interest Form give full details of what is required in order for your application to be considered include the following:
If you have any queries or require further information, please contact sce.research.admin@hud.ac.uk
Project Code: SCE_2024_CAS
We are seeking the very best graduates from across the UK to participate in our Chancellor’s Anniversary Scholarships Scheme, which gives those selected access to a full tuition waiver on their research degree.
To celebrate 200 years of the University of Huddersfield, which in 1825 was established as The Science and Mechanics Institute, we are awarding up to 60 Chancellor’s Anniversary Scholarships across all PhD disciplines.
These scholarships are available across all academic disciplines for research undertaken on either a full-time or part-time basis where there is sufficient supervisory capacity.
Our Chancellor’s Anniversary Scholarships are available for the standard registration period only; for doctoral awards this will be either 3 years full-time or 6 years part-time. The scholarship will not apply to any research undertaken outside of this standard registration period, including any write-up period.
Our Chancellor’s Anniversary Scholarships Scheme is a competitive application process open to home (UK resident) candidates and to be eligible you must have achieved one of the following:
This scholarship applies to eligible research degrees for 2023/24 and is open to home candidates (UK only).
Candidates must meet the standard entry requirements for the course for which they are applying.
If you are due to graduate in the current academic year, any offer will be conditional on your final degree outcome.
Reapplications for a scholarship within the School of Computing and Engineering will not be considered within 12 months of a previous unsuccessful application study.
All scholarships are subject to satisfactory academic progress including successful completion of Progression Monitoring.
Applications for scholarship opportunities are made by first submitting an Expression of Interest following which successful candidates will be invited to submit a full application. Please see the webpages below for more information on this process:
The above links and Expression of Interest Form give full details of what is required in order for your application to be considered include the following:
If you have any queries or require further information, please contact sce.research.admin@hud.ac.uk
As part of the £5.5m EPSRC grant, ‘Next Generation Metrology Driven by Nanophotonics’ awarded to the Universities of Huddersfield and Southampton, https://gow.epsrc.ukri.org/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/T02643X/1 , we have several PhD opportunities to offer and are interested in finding applicants with 2:1 degree or above in Physics, Mathematics, Engineering or a related discipline and with and interest in the areas of optical metamaterials, nanophotonics and instrumentation.
Metrology is the science of measurement, while the term “optical metrology” refers to making measurements based upon the physical interactions of light. Optical metrology plays a vital role in a wide range of activities including fundamental scientific discovery, materials processing, manufacturing, healthcare and energy.
Nonetheless, there are several longstanding technological challenges associated with current optical instrumentation. For instance, smart and autonomous manufacturing processes as envisaged by ‘factories of the future’ require low-cost sensors operating in-situ; this requires a degree of miniaturisation that is currently impossible to achieve. Conventional approaches, including those based on micro-optics and photonic integrated circuits, have only yielded incremental improvements thus far. However, recent advances in nanophotonics now offer the possibility of a step-change in capability.
Conventional optical components, such as lenses, rely on the properties of precisely shaped bulk materials to manipulate light. Often complex assemblies of several elements are needed to produce the required optical functionality, and the shaping of each element is a slow and costly requiring a precise combination of grinding and polishing. Nanophotonic elements, such as metasurfaces, provide for the exquisite control of light with planar devices, containing arrays of sub-wavelength elements, that are both lightweight and compact and can be produced by a variety of lithographic processes. This opens up the possibility for simpler, lighter, small and cheaper optical assemblies that will form the basis for the next-generation of optical instrumentation and sensor technologies.
While the roles advertised here are situated at the University of Huddersfield, the programme will involve close collaboration with our partners at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, and so the applicant should be comfortable working in a team environment in order to contribute to a larger project.
All advertised PhD projects are fully-funded, including support for tuition fees and a stipend at the standard EPSRC rate (currently £19,237 per year).
Exploring dynamic wavefront manipulation for photonic edge computing
Synopsis - Our increased ability to precisely modify electromagnetic fields by using nanophotonic elements such as metasurfaces, or adaptive optics such as deformable mirrors/spatial light modulators, opens up the possibility that signal processing steps in optical instrumentation, previously carried out on a computer, can be circumvented by operating on light directly. Such an approach would allow the required computation to be carried out virtually instantaneously and with a reduction in energy expenditure.
By taking optical measurements of manufactured components as they are being shaped, feedback can be provided facilitate real time process control and correction. Ultimately, this leads to more precise tolerances and fewer components being scrapped. However, optical sensors generate large quantities of data that often needs to be transferred over a network to a central point where capable but expensive computing systems are used to process it. Edge computing is the concept of moving the computation and data storage so that it is co-located with the sensor systems, minimising information transfer. While such an approach solves some of the problems, the approach still requires expensive and power-hungry computers at each sensor to process the data.
This project will look to remove the need for the signals to be processed using silicon-based computers by directly operating on the light itself. While some optical computation been demonstrated in the last few years, with operations such as edge detection and differentiation being carried out using metasurfaces, and the exploitation of the well-known Fourier transforming property of a standard lens; this project will build on these approaches to realise all the steps needed to allow a final result to be recorded directly. Initially spatial light modulators will be used to develop the signal processing stages required for optical sensor systems into the optical domain, before the resulting manipulations obtained are transferred to static, passive, metasurface elements. This will demonstrate the potential for photonic computing to increase measurement bandwidth while simultaneously reducing system cost and energy usage.
The successful candidate for this research project will ideally have a solid background in physics, electronic engineering or mathematics.
Using multi-element metasurfaces to enhance optical metrology systems
Synopsis - Photonic metasurfaces are nanostructured surfaces that allow the manipulation of light without the bulk of traditional refractive optics. We have recently demonstrated several optical sensors, each based on the use of a single metasurface, which facilitates compactness, lightweighting and extended functionality. However, by moving to systems incorporating multiple metasurfaces in each sensor far more interesting cases can be realised, with more complex manipulations being carried out, and better correction of any performance deficiencies. This project will look to design sensors based on multiple metasurface elements to realise ultra-compact forms of sensors utilising a variety of optical techniques such as white light interferometry and phase shifting interferometry.
Photonic metasurfaces manipulate the properties of incident light (phase, polarisation and amplitude) using nanostructures arranged on a surface; they only require a planar layer of material that is of the order of the wavelength in thickness to reproduce the optical functionality delivered by far larger conventional optical elements. The control they offer also allows more complex optical elements to be created, combining the functionality of previously delivered by several elements into a single metasurface element to further simplifying optical systems. In the last few years, we have had significant success in developing ultra-compact and lightweight optical sensors based around a single metasurface, but there are many situations where the use of multiple metasurfaces would greatly advance what can be achieved. In many cases it is useful to modify fields and then let them evolve by propagating through space before a second or even third operation is applied. Such an approach allows light from one point on a wavefront to be combined with light from other points, and the presence of multiple elements allows issues such as chromatic aberration to be corrected for. The use of multiple metasurfaces allows far more complex manipulations to be carried out while still exploiting the lightweight and compact form of the metasurfaces, however the increased number of parameters adds significantly to the complexity of the design process.
This research project will explore the possibility of combining two or more optical metasurfaces to enhance functionality and/or improve performance of optical sensors for manufacturing metrology. The possibility of dynamically altering the properties of light using multiple metasurfaces will also be investigated.
The successful candidate for this research project will have a solid background in physics, optical engineering, or another closely related engineering discipline.
Ultra-compact chromatic confocal sensor implementing metasurfaces for rapid surface topography evaluation using coordinate measuring machines
Synopsis - This project will build upon initial demonstrations of a metasurface based compact chromatic confocal sensor, developing it into an optimised device, suitable for use in real-world applications and characterising its performance. This project will build on an novel concept based on standalone metasurfaces to a form where all of the elements are realised in one robust monolithic device, attached directly to the end of an optical fibre to form an ultra-compact probe capable of making form and surface measurements on difficult to access structures such as boreholes.
This is a 4 year funded Industrial Case project, co-sponsored by EPSRC and Renishaw plc. This project also offers the option to undertake an industrial placement with Renishaw as part of the programme of study.
Rapid, non-contact, surface topography evaluation probes in a form factor compact enough for integration with coordinate measurement machine (CMM) probe systems represent a technology gap for which the market has yet to provide a robust solution. Non-contact scanning systems currently tend to rely on machine vision or fringe projection which can provide some analysis of form/waviness but struggle to achieve sufficient resolution for surface roughness analysis. Non-contact probes tend to be vision system based and are of such a size that important commercial measurement applications involving difficult access e.g. boreholes cannot be facilitated with these technologies.
This research project will investigate the potential of using a metasurface based chromatic confocal sensors as an ultra-compact, non-contact, touch probe alternative, building on our initial proof-of-concept demonstration of this work. This project will investigate how photonic metasurfaces can be used to achieve the necessary miniaturisation of both the probe and interrogation apparatus. The project will also investigate how the incorporation of metasurfaces into an optical measurement system impact on the metrological characteristics, especially in relation to environmental stability. Opportunities for photonic metasurfaces to support miniaturisation of the spectral interrogation required for CCS, as part of a hybrid optical system will also be investigated.
The successful candidate for this research project will have a solid background in optical engineering (or another closely related engineering discipline). Experience in building/maintaining optical apparatus, electronic design and programming would also be advantageous.
Interested applicants should email metrology@hud.ac.uk by Friday 14th June 2024, with a CV and covering letter detailing education history and highlighting any relevant experience.
Informal enquiries can be directed to either Prof. Jane Jiang (x.jiang@hud.ac.uk) or Dr Andrew Henning (a.henning@hud.ac.uk)
The EPSRC programme ‘Next Generation Metrology Driven by Nanophotonics’ is a collaboration between the Centre for Precision Technologies (University of Huddersfield) and the Optoelectronics Research Centre (University of Southampton).
Centre of Precision Technologies (CPT)
https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/cpt/
The CPT is a centre of excellence for collaborative metrology solving real-world manufacturing problems through cutting edge metrology research in precision engineering, maintaining strong industrial connections with >100 companies. Its research, over more than two decades, has provided modern, cutting-edge measurement theory and technologies for dimensional and surface texture, machine performance; and mathematics for measurement.
Operating at the forefront of new measurement techniques, we apply novel measurement concepts to solve real world metrology problems. Highly innovative research and strong links with industry resulted in the EPSRC designating the CPT as a National Centre of Excellence in Advanced Metrology in 2011. Building on this success, CPT was awarded a £13M grant by EPSRC to create a Future Manufacturing Research Hub in 2017. Headed by Professor Dame Xiangqian (Jane) Jiang, the Future Metrology Hub’s focus is to transform the UK’s manufacturing performance by delivering technologies that provide significant improvements in the speed, accuracy and cost of measurement.
In 2022 the CPT was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize which recognised the innovative and ground-breaking work in advanced measurement for smart manufacturing.
Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC)
https://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/who-we-are .
The ORC is the UK’s largest and one of the world’s leading photonics research institutes, with the ORC’s Nanophotonics & Metamaterials group being recognised for setting and leading the international agenda in its field. In 2017, the UoS received a Queen's Anniversary Prize for decades of innovative leadership in the field for “Innovations in photonics that enhance the global fibre internet, laser manufacturing, next generation computing and new optical technologies”.