PhD Opportunities in Computational Science in United Kingdom

PhD opportunity: Optimal Perturbations in Turbulent Flows at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. This competition-funded Doctor of Philosophy project investigates which disturbances produce the largest response in turbulent flows. The research combines fluid mechanics, dynamical systems and chaos theory to understand how turbulence amplifies disturbances and generates organised patterns of motion. The successful researcher will develop a chaotic resolvent framework for analysing forci...

[EPSRC-funded PhD studentship providing fees plus a stipend of £21,805 per annum for 2026/7.] University of Exeter PhD studentship in Uncertainty Quantification for Healthcare Models: A Route to Precision Medicine . This project develops methods to make patient-specific mathematical models more credible for use in clinical decision-making. The research is rooted in uncertainty quantification (UQ) and focuses on how to trust, calibrate, and interpret complex cardiovascular models when applied to ...

Fully funded PhD studentships in Astrophysics are available at the University of Bristol , in the Astrophysics Group, School of Physics . The advertised research areas include Astronomical Foundation Models , Galaxy Formation and Evolution , and Ice Giant Atmospheric Modelling . These projects sit within astrophysics and broader physics, with possible links to scientific computing, programming, mathematics, and meteorology depending on the specific project. The studentships are described as limi...

University of Southampton is advertising a PhD project in planetary climate physics focused on a major open question in giant-planet atmospheres: how giant storms form and how heat is redistributed across fast-rotating planets . The project will use the OASIS computational model to run advanced three-dimensional climate simulations of Jupiter and Jupiter-like planets. Research topics include atmospheric physics , cloud physics , turbulence , atmospheric circulation , and the development of large...

University of Southampton is advertising a competition-funded PhD project titled “Tracing cloud formation pathways across Earth’s atmospheric history.” The project sits in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences and is based in the School of Physics & Astronomy . This research explores how clouds influenced Earth’s climate through time, including how the planet remained habitable under a fainter young Sun and whether cloud–atmosphere interactions could have triggered abrupt climate tran...

PhD project at the University of Southampton: Testing the foundations of cosmology with quasars. This postgraduate research project in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences explores whether the Universe is statistically isotropic on the largest scales. Using public WISE and Gaia quasar catalogues, plus public spectroscopy and complementary SPHEREx and Euclid releases where available, the project investigates a possible dipole signal in the sky distribution of distant quasars. The rese...

PhD opportunity at the University of Southampton in astrophysics and observational astronomy, focused on changing-look active galactic nuclei (AGN) and the evolution of supermassive black holes . The project asks why some black holes appear to change dramatically over just months, challenging current ideas about accretion and black-hole growth. The successful candidate will collate a uniform sample of changing-look AGN using major surveys such as SPHEREx, WISE, Euclid, and eROSITA , then measure...

Applied and Computational Mathematics PhD at the University of Edinburgh (School of Mathematics, College of Science and Engineering). This research programme focuses on applied mathematics, computational mathematics, mathematical modelling, dynamical systems, numerical analysis, scientific computing, data science, machine learning, and AI. Research topics include fluid dynamics, climate and weather modelling, multiscale methods, molecular and statistical dynamics, plasma physics and fusion, math...

Funded PhD opportunity at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with AstraZeneca: Machine Learning for Drug Discovery . This four-year, AstraZeneca-funded PhD studentship focuses on physics-guided representation learning and other machine learning approaches for drug discovery. The project offers access to rich proprietary drug-discovery datasets and close collaboration with scientists at AstraZeneca. Likely research areas include machine learning , statistics , mathematics , scientific c...