CyberInvent: Where Cybersecurity Research Meets Real-World Impact

About the project

About the Project Considering doing a PhD in cyber security, but don’t want to spend three years working on something nobody outside academia ever sees? Fair. That’s why CyberInvent exists. Through CyberSight25 , industry leaders have laid out the cyber problems they genuinely want solved. Not “nice to have” ideas, but the stuff they’re actually dealing with. Things like: How do we make sense of the ridiculous amount of cyber data already being collected? How do we know where our data is going once third parties get involved? How do we work out which vulnerabilities actually matter to the business? How do we manage risky user behaviour? How do we use GenAI without creating a whole new security headache? How do we deal with third-party and supply-chain risk? And how do we stop adding more security tools just to create more noise? That’s your starting point. With CyberInvent, you choose a CyberSight25 challenge , or a problem you've identified yourself, and turn it into a fully funded three-year PhD at Cardiff University. You’ll get a £19,237 annual stipend, expert academic supervision, input from industry and entrepreneurship training. And here’s the interesting bit. If your research turns into something useful, it doesn’t have to end up gathering dust in a PDF somewhere. You can take it into Cyber Innovation Hub’s Venture Building Programme, build a team around it, test whether there’s a real market and potentially turn it into a company. So yes, you get the PhD. But you also get three years to properly get stuck into a cyber problem that people in industry are already asking someone to solve. Not a bad way to spend three years. Applications are accepted year round, but for the April 2027 intake, apply by 15 October 2026. Find out more and apply: https://cyberinnovationhub.wales/cyber-initiatives/cyberinvent/

Research areas