Do you have a Master’s degree and are looking for fully funded PhD opportunities? University of Southampton, United Kingdom is now accepting applications for several funded PhD programs across a range of research areas.
1. Fully Funded PhD in Desert dune avalanche processes
Summary of Funded PhD Program
This project will examine how wind-blown avalanches are controlled by sediment transport dynamics including dune size, wind speed and grain characteristics. It involves laboratory experiments and field work. Research outcomes will provide unique, cutting-edge insight into the influence of avalanche dynamics on aeolian dune migration, critical for management in deserts.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
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2. Fully Funded PhD in Exploring the extreme Venus climate and hot terrestrial exoplanets
Summary of Funded PhD Program
Venus, the planet in the Solar System most similar to Earth in terms of mass and size, has a massive CO2 atmosphere that creates extremely harsh conditions on its surface. The planet is completely covered by clouds containing a mixture of sulphuric acid and water droplets. Venus’s atmospheric circulation has physical dynamic features that are not well understood, including super-rotation, where the air moves much faster than the planet itself, and a polar vortex that changes rapidly.
Application Deadline: 30 Mar 2025
3. Fully Funded PhD in Does it rain on other planets?
Summary of Funded PhD Program
Titan, has a thick atmosphere mostly composed of nitrogen (>97%) and methane (<3%). Methane exists in Titan’s environment in solid, vapour, and liquid forms, and it rains in lakes and seas. The methane cycle on Titan resembles Earth’s water cycle, making it an important subject for studying weather patterns in climate models. Despite its similarity to Earth’s water cycle, Titan does not have large amounts of methane at its surface, unlike water oceans on Earth.
Application Deadline: 30 Mar 2025
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4. Fully Funded PhD in Polar amplification of climate change
Summary of Funded PhD Program
In this project, the successful candidate will interpret geological archives using numerical climate models (e.g., Goodwin and Williams, 2023) and theory to quantify which processes dominate polar amplification, explain why the Arctic and Antarctic respond differently during different geological eras and make future projections. Several geological events will be explored, such as: the causes of Antarctic glacial onset; polar responses during Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum warming; Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles; continental uplift (Gernon et al., 2024); and the potential for snowball Earth inception. Future polar responses during the Anthropocene will also be explored over many timescales.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
5. Fully Funded PhD in Palaeoecological dynamics of coral reef ecosystem collapse and recovery
Summary of Funded PhD Program
Coral reef ecosystems are experiencing extreme ecological changes under the stress of climate change, threatening some of the most important biodiversity hotspots on Earth. The fossil record during ancient climate change intervals holds clues into what the future holds for coral reefs under the threat of climate change. Coral reef ecosystems have undergone profound evolutionary and ecological changes over hundreds of millions of years, including the shift from extinct tabulate and rugose corals to modern scleractinian corals, and spanning numerous crises and recoveries associated with climate change.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
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6. Fully Funded PhD in Past climate land-ocean-atmosphere interactions: lessons for our greenhouse future
Summary of Funded PhD Program
Shifting rainfall patterns and seasons represent an alarming consequence of human-driven global climate change. Yet even the sign (wetter/drier) of future change is uncertain in some regions. This project examines the response of continental climates to global warmth in the past to study natural forcing and evaluate uncertain future predictions.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
7. Fully Funded PhD in Oceanic Primary Production through the Phanerozoic
Summary of Funded PhD Program
In this PhD project, you will estimate how nutrient inputs (P, N & Fe) have changed over the Phanerozoic, using plate tectonic reconstruction software (e.g. GPlates) and simulations based on geological data spanning the last 550 million years – a time in which animal and plant life has proliferated and diversified in the oceans and on land. This will include developing estimates of Fe and P release scenarios associated with rock uplift using spatially explicit models of plate tectonics and global lithologies. You will then apply your nutrient input rates to the new biogeochemical model (an extension of the cGENIE Earth system model of intermediate complexity) to calculate how oceanic primary production has feasibly changed.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
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8. Fully Funded PhD in The role of Winter Water in the Southern Ocean’s overturning circulation and carbon cycle
Summary of Funded PhD Program
This project will use observations from autonomous platforms and an observationally constrained model to investigate the processes controlling the lifecycle, biogeochemical function and climatic sensitivities of Winter Water – an upper-ocean water mass that plays a key role in the Southern Ocean overturning circulation and carbon cycle. This project will determine the mechanisms governing the lifecycle, carbon-system function and climatic sensitivities of the Winter Water (WW).
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
9. Fully Funded PhD in Drivers of landscape fire activity in Africa
Summary of Funded PhD Program
This study proposes investigating the extent to which agricultural expansion and land cover change have influenced the reduction in African burned area using recent, high spatial resolution (30 m) land cover change datasets that describe changes in agricultural and woody cover (Potapov et al., 2022). Along with climate data, these will be combined with machine learning methods to identify the key drivers. This will be supported by the development of a high spatial resolution burned area dataset to map fire activity in agricultural landscapes and help determine the trends of the area burned in Africa.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
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10. Fully Funded PhD in Glaciers and climate change
Summary of Funded PhD Program
This project will use data from Iceland of techniques including ‘Planet Lab’, Sentinel-1 images, drone images and time-lapse cameras to carry out offset (or intensity) tracking, which is a well-established method for deriving displacements from repeat imagery. This will be used to calculate velocity and glacier retreat and facilitate new understanding of the role of subglacial hydrology in glacier retreat.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
11. Fully Funded PhD in Investigating the environmental stressors causing ancestral Polynesian migration from Taiwan
Summary of Funded PhD Program
The migration of Polynesians to the central and eastern Pacific around 1500 BCE to 1000 CE is supported by a combination of linguistic, archaeological, anthropological, and genetic evidence. Recent studies suggest that this movement may be related to environmental stressors, like drought, which prompted the Polynesians to seek new lands. The initial migration of their ancestors, or Austronesians, is believed to have begun from Taiwan around 3000–1500 BCE. However, the precise timing and reasons for this migration are unclear, leaving gaps in our understanding of human-environment reactions and Polynesian migration history.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
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12. Fully Funded PhD in Ancient climate change as a driver of ocean (de)oxygenation and marine ecology
Summary of Funded PhD Program
You will work on sediment and fossil foraminiferal material from the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and use advanced geochemical proxies, including foraminifera-bound nitrogen isotopes, foraminiferal I/Ca ratios, and lipid biomarkers, to reconstruct past marine oxygenation and explore the drivers behind these changes. You will then compare your generated paleo-oxygenation data with cutting-edge paleoclimate simulations to analyse the connections between ocean circulation, nutrient cycling, and oxygenation, shedding light on how these factors impacted carbon sequestration and marine ecosystems.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
13. Fully Funded PhD in Eco-evolutionary consequences of altered predator-prey interactions under tropicalisation
Summary of Funded PhD Program
The aim of this PhD is to provide a broad understanding the eco-evolutionary consequences of altered predator-prey interactions under modern tropicalisation. The project will focus on the rocky shore of the Baja peninsula (Mexico). Here, multiple tropical gastropod (snails) predators have established populations in temperate communities. You will conduct ecological studies at local and regional scales (e.g., photo-quadrat monitoring, biodiversity surveys, predator-exclusion experiments) to establish whether tropical predators are having negative impacts on the ecology and life history temperate prey. Analysis of museum specimens and literature will be used to test whether tropical predators have different functional and morphological traits compared to temperate predators.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
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14. Fully Funded PhD in Hidden microplastics: presence, pathways and impacts of tyre-wear particles and their chemical additives in the ocean
Summary of Funded PhD Program
This project will address an important knowledge gap regarding the presence, fate and impacts of tyre-wear particles and their chemical additives (collectively TWPs) in the ocean. The student will use already available samples of seawater, marine particles, deep-sea sediments and pelagic zooplankton to investigate the spread, characteristics, and pathways of TWPs in the ocean. They will explore the accumulation of TWPs in the guts and tissues of zooplankton to assess the ingestion of these contaminants by marine primary consumers and the ability of these contaminants to translocate within an organism. The project aims to constrain the role of TWPs in the context of global plastic contamination and to establish their potential risks to marine life.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
15. Fully Funded PhD in Long-term change in the benthos – seabed photography as a critical tool for monitoring
Summary of Funded PhD Program
Long-term environmental monitoring of changes to the seabed is rare but important, particularly as climate change accelerates. Seabed photography makes it possible, but inconsistency in application reduces comparability. This project will assess climate-related ecological change in benthic fauna and develop the consistency in seabed photography key to future marine monitoring.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
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16. Fully Funded PhD in Can nitrogen fixation contend ocean desert expansion?
Summary of Funded PhD Program
You will participate in two oceanographic expeditions in the IO gyre onboard the Research Vessel Marion Dufresne at its minimum and maximum expansion seasons in the frame of the EXPAND project funded by the ERC. You will measure the impact top-down controls on N2 fixation during experiments at-sea using state-of-the-art single-cell isotopic (nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry (at IOW Germany) and genetic and bioinformatic analyses (at the University of Southampton UK). These results will link cellular to ecosystem processes, bridging the gap between ocean desert expansion and N2 fixation in the world’s least explored gyre.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
17. Fully Funded PhD in A seismic study of rift-plume interaction in the South Atlantic
Summary of Funded PhD Program
The student will analyse wide-angle seismic data to be collected in the region of this change in an experiment scheduled for December 2025-January 2026. The experiment involves an international team from the UK, Germany and France. They will have the opportunity to participate in the experiment at sea. The analysis will involve the use of advanced travel-time and waveform tomography approaches to develop a detailed seismic velocity model. The resulting seismic velocity model will be integrated with coincident seismic reflection data and with regional gravity and magnetic data.
Application Deadline: 8 Jan 2025
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18. Fully Funded PhD in Is carbon dioxide release from sedimentary rocks a missing driver of geological climate change?
Summary of Funded PhD Program
This PhD project will use a novel data-modelling approach (ref. 2-3) to test whether rock organic carbon oxidation was responsible for modulating atmospheric CO2 change during major climate transitions during the Cenozoic and Mesozoic, including the Paleocene Eocene thermal maximum (56 million years ago) and the mid-Miocene Climatic Optimum (~15 million years ago). The results will help evaluate whether state-of-the-art Earth system models currently underestimate the climate response to CO2-driven warming in past warm climates.
Application Deadline: 9 Dec 2024