This PhD course is part of the EPSRC Centre of Doctoral Training (CDT) in Developing National Capability for Materials 4.0 led by the University of Manchester.
Success in achieving net zero, delivering a healthy nation and driving increased national resilience and productivity, will be critically reliant on novel materials and devices. This demands rapid delivery, but it typically takes up to 20 years to bring new materials to commercial use. To move faster we need scientists and engineers able to exploit new developments in high-throughput approaches to making, characterising and testing new materials, and able to deploy materials modelling and materials informatics to generate and exploit materials data. We need to digitalise the materials innovation process to accelerate development, certification and deployment of new materials, and materials systems. We need researchers adept at working across interfaces between machine learning, informatics, physical and cyber systems and modelling, learning from advances in other disciplines and breaking silos. In other words, we need graduates proficient in ‘Materials 4.0’.
The goal of this PhD program is to develop leaders in the field of Materials 4.0 and ambassadors for a broader cultural shift in the practice of materials science. Working across boundaries between fields, the students will develop and advocate for new capabilities (methods and techniques) to drive forward the digitalisation of materials research and innovation.
The CDT will develop the necessary skills in a significant number of new scientists, but our ambition is to build an even broader skills base for UK academia and industry. The training programme is therefore designed to take our students from learners to leaders over the course of the programme. The students will begin by learning core skills, but as they develop proficiency and confidence they will play a role in training others, within and external to the CDT. Their research projects will focus on developing new methods and tools within Materials 4.0 and in their last two years the students will take the lead in developing training materials for these new methods, delivering training and disseminating the new capability.
By training a new generation of researchers in the digitalisation of materials science, the CDT will provide the skilled recruits that UK industry and academia need to shorten time to market, improve productivity and resilience and maintain industrial competitiveness. Moreover, through the innovative delivery mechanism of our national CDT bringing together the strengths of three national institutes, we will drive broad culture change, disseminating skills across industry and academia, making Materials 4.0 a ubiquitous way of doing materials science.
