CSIT Doctoral Training Programme – 15 PhD Studentships
Published | March 3, 2023 |
Location | Belfast, United Kingdom |
Category | Machine Learning |
Job Type | Scholarship |
Description

Queen’s University Belfast
Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), Queen’s University Belfast, UK
CSIT Doctoral Training Programme – 15 PhD Studentships
The Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT) at Queen’s University Belfast is currently offering a number of fully-funded PhD opportunities – up to 15 scholarships commencing in October 2023- in the following areas: Network & Wireless Security, Trusted Hardware & Applied Cryptography, Autonomous Security & Security of AI, Industrial Control System and Safety-critical System security.
As a PhD student you’ll be part of our CSIT Doctoral Training Program (DTP), an industry-supported dynamic doctoral research environment, aiming to produce a cohort of industry-conscious thinkers and leaders. The DTP will provide you with an opportunity to advance research in these exciting cyber security areas and be part of a vibrant world-class research community, while also having a focus on enterprise and leadership skills. Thus, the DTP will aim to offer collaborative and placement opportunities with CSIT industry partners, such as Thales, Qualcomm, Rolls Royce, and Nvidia, to provide real industry experience.
You will also have the unique opportunity to embark on a comprehensive training program, which will give you access to all modules on our certified MSc in Advanced Cyber Security and MSc AI, dedicated Innovation, Leadership and public engagement training, in addition to Spring Schools with seminars by experts in the field of cybersecurity.
Scholarships are available for local and UK-resident students, with a number of opportunities also open to international applicants. The scholarships provide fully paid PhD fees plus and annual tax-free stipend (~£27500) for an extended 3.5 year duration of the PhD project. This is equivalent to an entry level job in industry of > £32000. In addition, we will provide Travel awards to cover the cost of trips to conferences and summer schools. Finally, DTP PhD students will be given the opportunity to experience teaching demonstration to get a taste of academia (maximum ~£500 extra per month) and can apply for thesis and best paper awards.
Applicants must have at least a 2:1 Honours Degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics or closely related discipline.
Closing Date: 15 March 2023
*Please note that the deadline for applications from international candidates closed on 28 February*
For more information on the CSIT’s PhD Opportunities and how to apply, please visit https://www.qub.ac.uk/ecit/CSIT/Cyber-AIHub/CSIT-DTP/
Projects available:
A Trusted Execution Environment based framework for securing legacy embedded systems
Attacking is the best defence, also in Machine Learning
Context Awareness Enhancement of Physical layer Security Schemes in Multi-user 6G Wireless Networks
Cyber DALL-E for adversarial dataset generation
Cyber Security for Digital Twins
Cyber-defensive deception against intelligent adversaries in autonomous aerial networks
Deep-learning based Hardware Trojan Detection
DPU-Centric Distributed Network and Datacentre Security
Enabling and Accelerating Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis
Fault tolerant post quantum cryptography systems for satellite communications
Highly distributed learning for privacy preserving analytics
HSM enabled precomputation safe asymmetric PAKE designing
Integrated Quantum-resilient Cryptography
Investigating Security Vulnerabilities in Approximate Computing
Leveraging the programmable network for intrusion protection
Lightweight Post Quantum Cryptography on modern open-source RISC-V processors
Machine Learning for Secure 6G Cell-Free Massive MIMO
Malware detection beyond labelled datasets
Malware Vulnerabilities as a Heuristic for Layering Defence Mechanism in Detection Technology
Mitigating security risks in Unified Traffic Management (UTM) systems
Modelling Technopolitical Factors for Analysing and Attributing Cyber Attacks
Multi-Hardware Security for Supply Chain
Physical-Layer Security for IoT
Privacy-preserving By-Design: Brain-inspired Architectures for Security-sensitive Applications
Quantum Machine Learning for Securing 6G Networks
Quantum-Safe Identity-Based Encryption for lightweight Internet of Things
Reconnaissance-type Threat Detection with Datacentre Networks
Secure multi-tenant and federated satellite system
Secure Retrodirective Antennas using Post-quantum Cryptography
Securing Programmable Networks
Side-channel analysis and countermeasure on Post Quantum Cryptographic
Side-channel analysis supports in Physical Unclonable Function modelling
Using Reinforcement Learning to Prepare Cyber-Attack Responses for Cyber Physical Systems