PhD scholarships I can supervise
Scholarship-funded PhD, 3–4 years Start: Usually October
Eligibility: Open to home and international applicants, subject to each scheme’s own rules. A strong background in applied mathematics, physics or engineering.
The scholarships below fund PhD study at Cambridge. Most of them you apply for yourself, alongside your application for admission — they are not awarded on a supervisor’s nomination, and nobody can put you forward for them. What a supervisor does is agree to take you, and an application backed by a supervisor who has already discussed the research with you is a materially stronger one. I am available to be that supervisor.
The schemes
The first three are applicant-led: you apply, and I support the application rather than submit it. The EPSRC DTP is different — those studentships attach to projects proposed by supervisors, so there the starting point is a conversation with me about a project.
- Cambridge Trust scholarships — the largest single source of funding for international students, and open to home students as well. Applying to the University considers you for most of these automatically.
- Gates Cambridge — full funding for applicants who are not UK citizens. A separate application with an earlier deadline than general admission.
- China Scholarship Council — administered jointly with the Cambridge Trust for applicants from China.
- EPSRC Doctoral Training Partnership — studentships run through the Department of Engineering, with different eligibility rules for home and international applicants.
Deadlines differ by scheme and move from year to year, and several of the funding deadlines fall well before the general admissions deadline. Check the Department of Engineering postgraduate pages and the University’s postgraduate admissions site for this year’s dates.
Where our interests would need to overlap
I supervise work in continuum mechanics: fluid–structure interaction, interfacial flows and soap films, kinematic optimization, the mechanics of feet and fins, and flows relevant to renewable energy. An application I can support is one where your interests genuinely meet those — not one where the overlap has been manufactured for the form.
Approaching me
Write before you apply. Send a CV, a paragraph on your background, and a few sentences on which of the problems above interests you and why. Say which scheme you are aiming at and what its deadline is, so I know what timetable we are working to. A message that could have gone to fifty academics unchanged tells me nothing.
If you are still deciding whether to do a PhD at all, read Stephen Stearns’ modest advice first.