Applied Statistics
Heriot-Watt University
About the Project Marine regions around the world encounter similar ecological challenges linked to fishing activities, including those arising from fisheries that use passive or static gear such as traps. Passive gear fisheries (e.g., creels) are often deemed sustainable compared to mobile bottom towed gear fisheries, as they are associated with lower fuel use and seabed damage [1]. However, passive gears are often specifically associated with some other challenges (e.g.
- Location
- Edinburgh, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- 30 September 2026
- Funding
- Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
The University of Manchester
About the Project Applications are now open for a unique studentship opportunity based in Pakistan. The NIHR-funded ACROSS (Affordable Cardiac Rehabilitation: An Outreach Inter-Disciplinary Strategic Study) aims to develop a culturally adapted and affordable home-based rehabilitation programme for people with multiple long-term health conditions including heart disease and anxiety/depression.
- Location
- Manchester, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- 15 October 2026
- Funding
- Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
The University of Manchester
About the Project This PhD studentship is funded by a psoriasis association research grant. Background: Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin disease associated with several comorbidities, including major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE), which are among the leading causes of death worldwide. Although some studies suggest that people with psoriasis have an increased risk of MACE compared with the general population, others have reported no significant association.
- Location
- Manchester, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- 15 October 2026
- Funding
- Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
University of Bath
About the Project This project is one of several in competition for funding from the GW4 BioMed3 MRC Doctoral Landscape Programme (DLP), which is offering up to 17 studentships for entry in September 2027. The partnership brings together the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter to develop the next generation of biomedical researchers.
- Location
- Bath, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- 21 October 2026
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
University of East Anglia
About the Project Primary Supervisor: Dr. Aristidis K. Nikoloulopoulos Multivariate response data abound in many applications including insurance, risk management, finance, psychometrics, health and environmental sciences. Data from these application areas have different dependence structures. While a multivariate distribution fully encodes this dependence, the tractable families used in practice often impose restrictive marginal or dependence structures.
- Location
- Norwich, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- 30 November 2026
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of Edinburgh
About the Project In-situ optical spectroscopy during Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) captures high-resolution signals encoding the physical state of the melt pool. However, this data presents a formidable statistical challenge: observations are strongly non-i.i.d., exhibiting spatiotemporal autocorrelation, directional asymmetry from moving laser paths, and complex thermal dynamics.
- Location
- Edinburgh, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- 14 December 2026
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
Cardiff University
About the Project Gravitational-wave astronomy was pioneered in September 2015 with the first direct observation of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). A long time ago, far, far away two black holes spiralled into each other and merged, deforming space-time in the process. Those deformations propagated as waves, carrying information about the properties of the collision of the two black holes.
- Location
- Cardiff, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of Sheffield
About the Project Index trackers (ETFs, index funds, index mutual funds) aim to replicate the return of a reference equity index while keeping implementation frictions---notably turnover and trading costs---under control. Index tracking is a passive investment approach that frequently beats their actively managed counterparts over the long term.
- Location
- Sheffield, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of St Andrews
About the Project Conducting formal causal inference for ecological and/or environmental data is challenging due to the complex observational processes that are usually involved. The propensity score method allows the estimation of causal effects in non-experimental studies, however this is dependent on constructing emulated experiments to ensure independence between the observation process and treatment allocation.
- Location
- St Andrews, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
University of Portsmouth
About the Project Applications are invited for a self-funded, 3 year full-time or 6 year part-time PhD project. The PhD will be based in the School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering and will be supervised by Dr Shamsul Masum , Dr Edward Smart and Professor Jim Khan (Consultant from Portsmouth Hospital University Trust).
- Location
- Portsmouth, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of Portsmouth
About the Project Applications are invited for a self-funded, 3 year full-time or 6 year part-time PhD project. The PhD will be based in the School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering and will be supervised by Dr Shamsul Masum , Dr John Chiverton and Dr Jennifer Straatman (Consultant from Portsmouth Hospital University Trust). Robotic cholecystectomy is a common procedure, yet variation in surgical technique impacts patient outcomes.
- Location
- Portsmouth, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of St Andrews
About the Project Mutations are the raw material of evolution: they generate the variation on which natural selection acts. Understanding their fate is therefore key to a fundamental question in evolutionary biology: how do species adapt to ever-changing environments? Mutations can be deleterious, advantageous, or neutral, depending on whether they decrease, increase, or have no effect on fitness (Moutinho 2020).
- Location
- St Andrews, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
Cardiff University
About the Project Project Description Remote sensing measurements provide indirect, noisy, and often incomplete observations of environmental systems. Tasks such as super-resolution, SAR despeckling, and spectral unmixing are fundamentally ill-posed inverse problems, yet most modern deep learning approaches focus on producing point estimates and lack reliable uncertainty quantification.
- Location
- Cardiff, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
Cardiff University
About the Project Project Description Flood mapping from Earth observation (EO) data is a critical input to disaster risk management and climate resilience planning. However, machine learning models for flood detection and flood susceptibility mapping often struggle to generalise when applied to new geographical regions.
- Location
- Cardiff, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
The University of Manchester
About the Project Background: Immune checkpoint inhibitors (CPIs) such as BLOCKING antibodies targeting CTLA4 (e.g. ipilimumab) have revolutionised the treatment of metastatic cancers by offering long-term remission, by boosting the immune response. Unfortunately, these agents are associated with serious autoimmune adverse events.
- Location
- Manchester, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of St Andrews
About the Project Improved survival (whether this is literal survival, time to a change in symptoms, or time to disease progression) is a key outcome in cancer research. Most applications of survival analysis in the area use standard approaches, but the manner in which events are defined may bias these. Estimating and addressing such biases may be one strand of this project.
- Location
- St Andrews, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
University of St Andrews
About the Project Reliable estimates of wildlife population size are fundamental to effective management and conservation. One important component of reliability is the precision (or, conversely, variance) of the estimate.
- Location
- St Andrews, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
University of Leicester
About the Project Health and social care interventions—like those for quitting smoking or managing weight—are often made up of several parts. For example, a smoking cessation programme might include motivational sessions, behaviour-change strategies, and different delivery formats (online, in-person, group sessions) [1]. These programmes can vary in intensity, setting, and who delivers them.
- Location
- Leicester, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of Birmingham
About the Project Diagnostic tests are central to effective clinical decision‑making, yet the performance reported in research studies often differs markedly from that observed in everyday NHS settings. Variability in disease prevalence, workflow, patient presentation, and clinical thresholds can significantly influence sensitivity, specificity, and predictive values.
- Location
- Birmingham, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of St Andrews
About the Project This project will consider if we can use phylogenetic analysis to correct for imperfections in eyewitness testimony. Eyewitness testimony from events with multiple witnesses is often inconsistent and sometime contradictory. If we think of these inconsistencies as mutations from a common ancestor with perfect recall (but not necessarily perspective) on the event, can we obtain an objective estimate of what the collected witnesses saw?
- Location
- St Andrews, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
University of Salford
About the Project Environmental contamination is a broad topical issue in the concern of sustainable development and climate change. Economic development of human society has resulted in global large destruction and contamination on soil, water, air, and general natural resources.
- Location
- Manchester, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of Portsmouth
About the Project Applications are invited for a self-funded, 3 year full-time or 6 year part-time PhD project. The PhD will be based in the School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering and will be supervised by Dr Shamsul Masum , Dr Edward Smart and Nick Sangala (Consultant from Portsmouth Hospital University Trust). The work on this project will: Aim to identify trends in patients with IDH using routinely collected hospital data.
- Location
- Portsmouth, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of Birmingham
About the Project Optimization algorithms are fundamental to modern data science and machine learning, underpinning applications from training AI models to solving large-scale inverse problems. However, traditional optimization methods are usually based on fixed update rules and often require substantial manual tuning. This PhD project will investigate Learning to Optimize (L2O) , where machine learning is used to automatically design or improve optimization algorithms.
- Location
- Birmingham, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
University of Reading
About the Project About the Project Local authorities are often the ones in charge of taking substantive measures to protect the environment. Yet, the existing scholarship has devoted scant attention to how local-level actors deal with climate change.
- Location
- Reading, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
Royal Holloway, University of London
About the Project Supernovae are the explosive deaths of certain types of star at the ends of their lives. They play an important role in the Universe, being the key distributors of heavy elements. With surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility and ATLAS, the numbers of these events discovered every year has risen to the 1000s, revealing a whole new variety of supernovae never observed before.
- Location
- Egham, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
University of Leicester
About the Project Project Description We invite applications for a PhD project focused on developing and evaluating statistical methods for analysing outcomes in multiple pregnancies, using data from the MBRRACE-UK national perinatal surveillance programme. This project addresses key methodological challenges in understanding perinatal mortality among twins and other multiples, with real-world impact on national reporting and clinical practice.
- Location
- Leicester, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of St Andrews
About the Project Evidence-based conservation and ecology are reliant on wildlife surveys. As a result, there exists a range of methods that have been developed specifically with the aim of estimating animal abundance and animal distribution. Traditionally data have been collected by humans and are often modelled as a ‘snapshot’ of the system at a particular moment in time. However, we often have more information available to us such as a precise time of observation.
- Location
- St Andrews, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
University of St Andrews
About the Project Prostate Cancer is the most common cancer in men in the US and UK. Obesity is a known risk factor for many cancers and levels of obesity are increasing. Despite the disease and potential risk factor being so common, the evidence for obesity as a risk factor for prostate cancer is inconsistent – as evidenced by a recent meta-analysis (despite the meta-analysis itself not being entirely satisfactory).
- Location
- St Andrews, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
The University of Manchester
About the Project Background: Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) were successful in identifying 100s of genetic variants associated with autoimmune disease susceptibility. However, the value of Polygenic Risk Scores (PRS) for clinical medicine is limited. When considered in aggregate, genetic variants identified so far explain only a small proportion of genetic liability to disease (missing heritability), because of methodological limitations.
- Location
- Manchester, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of Portsmouth
About the Project Applications are invited for a self-funded, 3 year full-time or 6 year part-time PhD project. The PhD will be based in the School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering and will be supervised by Dr Shamsul Masum , Dr Edward Smart and Philip Pucher (Consultant from Portsmouth Hospital University Trust).
- Location
- Portsmouth, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of Sheffield
About the Project Scanning transmission electron microscopy is an imaging method that raster scans a focused high-energy electron beam across a thin sample and measures the electron intensity behind the specimen with either a small detector placed on axis (bright field) or a larger, ring-like detector placed off-axis (annular dark field).
- Location
- Sheffield, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
Edinburgh Napier University
About the Project The construction sector is one of the largest global sources of greenhouse gas emissions, primarily due to the production of carbon-intensive materials such as cement and steel. Efforts to reduce these emissions (through building standards, procurement rules, labelling schemes, and corporate reporting) rely almost entirely on attributional life cycle assessment (LCA) data and methods.
- Location
- Edinburgh, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
Cardiff University
About the Project Black holes and neutron stars are the densest objects in the universe, well beyond what we can produce in a laboratory and at the very edge of our understanding of physics. They lead to puzzling physical consequences, in particular regarding the behaviour of space and time.
- Location
- Cardiff, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of Leicester
About the Project Project overview The UK’s national surveillance programme MBRRACE-UK provides robust estimates of perinatal mortality to maternity and neonatal care providers. However, geographically defined organisations, such as Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and local authorities, also require reliable estimates for smaller areas to target interventions effectively. Direct estimates for these areas are often unstable due to small sample sizes and rare events.
- Location
- Leicester, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of St Andrews
About the Project This project will develop statistical methodology for noisy time-series data and stochastic computational models to analyse live-cell imaging data provided by the lab of our collaborator Dr Cerys Manning at the University of Manchester. Live-cell imaging is a powerful technique for real-time observation of the activity of genes in single cells.
- Location
- St Andrews, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
University of St Andrews
About the Project This project aims to create a new framework for studying the dynamics of systems that exhibit periodic behaviour or multiple equilibria. These types of dynamic behaviours are common in various fields such as molecular biology and epidemiology. Examples include the circadian clocks, oscillatory responses to stress signals, and the specialisation of stem cells, as well as epidemic oscillations driven by public awareness.
- Location
- St Andrews, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
University of Leicester
About the Project The way our bodies process medicines is not uniform across individuals, and a significant part of that variation is written into our DNA. The gene CYP2D6 encodes a cytochrome P450 enzyme responsible for metabolising approximately 25% of all clinically prescribed drugs, including opioid pain relief, antidepressants, and antipsychotics.
- Location
- Leicester, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of St Andrews
About the Project Many tools exist that will take the expression profile of a tumour sample and decompose that signal into components arising from different tissue types (e.g. tumour cells, benign cells, immune cells, fibroblasts, stromal cells etc.).
- Location
- St Andrews, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
Applied Statistics
The University of Manchester
About the Project Complex somatic structural variations (SVs) in genomic regions such as centromeres and telomeres play a crucial role in driving many genetic disorders. For example, large SVs in centromeric regions contribute to chromosomal instability (CIN) and therapy resistance in cancers like glioblastoma and lung cancer.
- Location
- Manchester, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only
Applied Statistics
University of Leicester
About the Project We invite applications for a PhD project aimed at improving the methods for national perinatal surveillance using real-world healthcare data. This project will use data from the MBRRACE-UK perinatal surveillance programme, which monitors stillbirths and neonatal deaths across the UK, to illustrate and test methodological innovations.
- Location
- Leicester, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Deadline
- Year-round applications
- Funding
- Self-Funded PhD Students Only