Criteria for research projects
Research projects must meet five criteria:
- The project must be about theoretical and/or computational aspects of materials of some current or anticipated use to society1.
- The project must be demonstrably multiscale, spanning more than one length or time scale or both.
- The project must have at least two but usually no more than three supervisors, whose expertise resides at complementary, i.e. not identical, length and/or time scales to enable the project to be genuinely multiscale. One supervisor may be in industry, a government laboratory, or another London institution that is a member of the Thomas Young Centre. One supervisor may be an experimentalist. In all cases there must be at least one supervisor at Imperial College with expertise on theory and simulation of materials.
- The scientific excellence of the project will be assessed against the risks bearing in mind that this is a PhD project that has to be completed within three years after completion of the MSc. For example there should be a backup plan in case the project fails to deliver any results after 18 months.
- Supervisors will be expected to be willing to contribute to the delivery of the DTC if you are awarded a studentship, either through its teaching/training, or its management, or by becoming a cohort mentor. Supervisors will be asked to specify how they will contribute if they are not doing so already.
1This excludes some forms of matter such as gases and solid argon, but it does not exclude liquids, such as those used in melt processing, liquid crystals or novel ionic liquids. The crucial point is that there is some technology that the material already enables or may enable in the future.