Sarah Boulton

[Fully-funded ARIES studentship for 3.5 years, including tuition fees, maintenance stipend (£20,780 per annum for 2025/26, 2026/27 rate TBC), and research costs.] This fully-funded PhD studentship at the University of Plymouth investigates the role of climate and tectonics in correlated and path dependent landsliding. The project addresses fundamental questions about where landslides initiate following extreme events and the influence of pre-existing failures, challenging traditional assumptions by exploring spatial and temporal clustering of landslides. Using multi-temporal landslide inventories and high-resolution satellite imagery, the research aims to understand how landscape characteristics, climate, and triggering events such as earthquakes and intense rainfall influence landslide reactivation and expansion. The successful candidate will build multi-year databases of landslide occurrences and control factors, identify areas of recurrent landsliding, and conduct field and modelling investigations into the processes causing consecutive landslides. Training will be provided in remote sensing and GIS, field geomorphic techniques, engineering geology methodologies, and coding (python/matlab), alongside transferable research skills. The project is supervised by Professor Sarah Boulton, Dr Martin Stokes, Dr Michael Whitworth, and Dr Joshua Jones, offering support from a team of international experts. Applicants should have a strong background in geoscience, be confident in fieldwork, and ideally have experience in GIS/Remote sensing or programming. The studentship covers tuition fees, a maintenance stipend (£20,780 per annum for 2025/26, 2026/27 rate TBC), and research costs for 3.5 years. The application deadline is 7 January 2026, and the studentship will commence on 1 October 2026. For informal enquiries, contact Professor Sarah Boulton at [email protected]. Apply via the University of Plymouth ARIES Doctoral Training webpage.

Funded PhD opportunity at the University of Plymouth in the Centre for Research in Natural Hazards and Risk Reduction . The project is titled “Revealing the Regolith: Investigating how subsurface conditions influence earthquake-triggered landslides” and focuses on geohazards , landslides , earthquake-triggered slope failure , regolith , GIS/remote sensing , computer modelling (using Landlab ), and cosmogenic nuclide analysis . The PhD includes fieldwork in the Italian Apennines and is a CASE project with AECOM , in collaboration with Filippo Catani at the University of Padua . The post says the successful candidate will gain a range of field, laboratory, data analysis, and coding skills, alongside transferable skills useful for careers in research and industry. Supervisory team: Sarah Boulton, Martin Stokes, and Suryodoy Ghoshal at the University of Plymouth, with collaboration from Filippo Catani (University of Padua). Funding: funded PhD opportunity; no stipend or tuition details are given in the post. Deadline: 16 December 2026. How to apply: use the application link in the post and follow the linked advert. The post also mentions scanning the QR code for more information.