PGR scholarships (PhD or MPhil)

The Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) at the University of Strathclyde welcomes applications for PhD studentships. Up to six fully funded positions are available for UK home students, covering the following: tuition fees, a stipend for living expenses, and a small travel budget.

Note that while this fund is not enough to cover non-UK tuition fees, the fund can be used to part-fund international students.

The Strathclyde Cyber Security Group (StrathCyber) is a university-wide cross-cutting research group that involves researchers from CIS, Electronic & Electrical Engineering, Accounting & Finance, Politics, and Law. Within StrathCyber, we aim to build resilience for future societies in cybersecurity contexts. We take problem-driven approaches, working to understand people and organisations (their behaviours, experiences, and challenges online) in the face of current and future threats to identity, privacy, and security. We strive to design solutions that enable legitimate citizens and organisations to operate safely and securely online to achieve their desired goals, and to protect them from online harms. We consciously consider the needs of those who are disenfranchised.

Applicants whose research interests align with those of the CIS@StrathCyber are strongly encouraged to apply.

For more information about StrathCyber and our research, please see the StrathCyber group page.

StrathCyber is recognised by GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR).

If you are interested in applying, please contact a potential supervisor as soon as possible, and before 22nd November 2024. Potential supervisors in the group are:

Formal Methods for Security

  • Jan de Muijnck-Hughes: making Systems more trustworthy through novel applications of type theory, dependently typed functional programming, and programming (& domain specific) language design and metatheory.
  • Ross Horne: works on problems that improve the security and privacy of critical systems that citizens use every day, such as contactless payments, e-passports, online authentication services, and personal data stores. Develops and applies methods to discover vulnerabilities in real systems in order to improve them and make them more secure. Working on the commercial adoption of secure technology that can better protect our digital lives.

Systems Security

  • Jide Edu: I am interested in developing intelligent and automated approaches to address various Cyber Security challenges. My focus areas include Security, Privacy, Identity Management, Access Control Models, and Trust. Additionally, I have a keen interest in exploring the role of Machine Learning and Human Factors in the context of Cyber Security.
  • Sotirios Terzis: socio-technical design of security mechanisms for user authentication, identification and trust management; engineering blockchain-base applications; and social- and nature-inspired approaches;
  • Daniel Thomas: accurate and ethical measurement of security and cybercrime; through measuring security and cybercrime we can monitor improvement, evaluate interventions and inform regulators. Using transdisciplinary methods.

Human Factors

  • Ali Farooq: behavioural cybersecurity, usable security and privacy, technology acceptance, adoption and post-adoption phases, and the consequences of technology use, including, but not limited to, physical and mental wellbeing, learning and performance.
  • Wendy Moncur: online identity, reputation, trust and cybersecurity; traversing disciplinary boundaries, drawing on Human Computer Interaction, psychology, sociology, digital anthropology and design.
  • Emma Nicol: empirical investigations of information seeking and user interactions with technology encompassing studies in many human contexts and occupational domains including Education, Healthcare, Law, FinTech and Cultural Heritage.
  • Karen Renaud: deploying behavioural science techniques to improve security behaviours, and in encouraging end-user privacy-preserving behaviours.
  • Pejman Saeghe: the impact of emerging tech (e.g. Metaverse and Generative AI) on authenticity, trust, media, interactions and communications, arts and humanities. I prefer qualitative and practice-led approaches. You don’t need a background in computer science.