Fully funded PhD positions are available now within the newly founded Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS) at the University of Southampton.

The £12m Institute is jointly funded by EPSRC (£6 million) and the University of Southampton and its partners (£6 million).  It brings together world-class simulation modelling research activities from across the University of Southampton and hosts Southampton's Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Complex Systems Simulation, running a doctoral training programme that is the first of its kind in the UK.

There are 10 fully funded 4-year EPSRC PhD studentships available this year, covering fees and providing a £16.5K tax-free premium stipend. We expect to admit a cohort of at least 20 funded students. Applications for October 2012 are invited now.

Complexity Science is an attempt to better understand systems where the interactions between component parts gives rise to global behaviour that is not straightforward to explain.  This is characteristic of many important and intriguing domains: climate, ecosystems, drugs, cells, brains, cities, markets, the Internet.  The ICSS is active in modelling complex systems across many scales and domains: from sub-atomic quantum dynamics to global climate processes.  The growing significance of understanding and managing such systems means that Complexity Science is increasingly being recognised as a critical area by industry, government and science itself.

The Institute's doctoral programme is four years in length, comprising a one-year taught component followed by a three-year research component.

The taught component involves modules on core skills, concepts, tools and methodologies for complexity science and high-performance computational modelling.  In addition, each student takes optional modules chosen to complement their research interests and skills.  These modules introduce and expand on relevant complex systems domains and advanced modelling methods.  The first year culminates in a student-selected 12-week research project applying the concepts, skills and tools that they have learned to a modelling problem from a chosen domain.

Over the next three years students will carry out independent doctoral research on a project defined jointly with their supervisors.  In addition to a truly exceptional research environment at the University of Southampton, opportunities to spend time on secondment at an industrial research lab and to gain “follow-on fellowships” at the conclusion of their PhD studies will help our students transition from the PhD programme to become research leaders in applying complex systems simulation to the most pressing scientific and engineering challenges of the 21st century.

Examples of the complex systems that our current students are modelling include: neuronal activity at the knee joint, habitat permeability for mammalian wildlife, economic, social and transport netorks, ecosystem dynamics in the atlantic ocean, micromagnetism, unmanned air vehicles, and self-organisation in cell membranes.

The Institute recruits graduates from across engineering, computing, biology, chemistry, medicine, physics, earth sciences, geography and mathematics plus, where appropriate, the quantitative social sciences (e.g., economics). There is an expectation that applicants should already possess or expect to achieve a first-class undergraduate degree or equivalent. Our intake will be theory-minded, math-literate and computer-literate, but in other respects we expect there to be considerable diversity – indeed we think this variety is an important asset.

For more details, and how to apply see: www.icss.soton.ac.uk