Dave Phillips

[Fees plus a stipend of £21,805 per annum for 2026/7; funded by EPSRC.] PhD Studentship at the University of Exeter in the Physics department on an ambitious project to build a polarisation-resolved nonlinear microscope with true 3D vectorial control of the focal field. This studentship is aimed at a candidate interested in advanced optical instrumentation, structured light, nonlinear microscopy, and the physics of biological tissue. The project will focus on polarisation-resolved second-harmonic generation (pSHG), a fast, label-free nonlinear imaging method widely used for collagen imaging in living tissue. The central research challenge is to overcome the limitation of conventional pSHG, which is largely sensitive only to in-plane structure. By using a spatial light modulator to shape both wavefront and polarisation, the student will engineer a longitudinal z-polarised field in a high-numerical-aperture focus and use it to probe out-of-plane collagen fibrils. The result will be a novel microscope capable of revealing 3D collagen organisation in unprecedented detail. The work combines optical design, microscope construction, hands-on alignment, vectorial focal-field modelling, and programming for instrument control and image analysis. The student will also engage with the Jones, Stokes, and Mueller formalisms, ultrafast nonlinear optics, and potentially machine-learning approaches to the inverse problem. The project is especially relevant to biophysics, biomechanics, and structural biology, since collagen architecture is central to tissue mechanics and disease progression. Funding is provided by EPSRC and includes fees plus a stipend of £21,805 per annum for 2026/7. The application deadline is 8 December 2026. Interested applicants should apply via the University of Exeter funding page using the application link provided in the advert. This is a strong opportunity for students with a background or interest in physics, optical engineering, biomedical imaging, and computational analysis who want to develop a cutting-edge research instrument and apply it to a major biological question.