From time to time, I have vacancies for PhD applicants. If I do have vacancies, these will be noted here.
As of 1 May 2012, I have no PhD vacancies. I really mean this!
If you are still keen to do a PhD/EngD with the Enterprise Systems group, try contacting one of my colleagues: Dimitris Kolovos (particularly on MDE and scalability), Manuel Oriol (on software testing), Fiona Polack (complex systems), Radu Calinescu (cloud computing, self-* systems, modelling), or Louis Rose (software evolution, MDE, complex systems).
PhD topics for my students focus on modelling, Model-Driven Engineering, Domain-Specific Languages, agile methods, formal methods, software architecture and failure analysis. I am interested in these topics applied in a number of different problem domains, including healthcare, distributed systems, cloud computing, air traffic management, complexity, and railway systems.
Important Details
You need to convince us that you can work successfully in a rapidly changing, exciting field. You need to be practically minded, happy to work with software tools (particularly Eclipse). You should be comfortable with programming; if you are a strong programmer, all the better. Above all, we want to see evidence that you are accomplished -- that you have set out to do something, and you have completed it successfully. Good examples of this include: working on an open-source project, setting up a company, building an app, running a technical group. Effectively, we want to see that you have ideas, and you can see them through to completion.
If you do join us, you'll be joining a friendly, dynamic, energetic team with a proven track record in international research. We have a lot of fun, we drink a lot of coffee, and occasionally a Nerf war breaks out.
If I have funding for a PhD studentship, it will be advertised here, and probably on the Department's web page. Note that funding for PhD studentships in the UK is now very difficult to obtain: the funding councils concentrate support in so-called Doctoral Training Centres (and Engineering Doctorate Centres) rather than for specific projects. As such, it is unlikely that I will have funding for PhD projects unless otherwise noted.