Dear all,

we are currently advertising the following three 4-year PhD positions for our lab with application deadlines early next year. 

The funding covers living expenses and UK/EU fees over four years and, using overseas research studentships, potentially also the higher fees for non-EU applicants.

Students are chosen in competition with students who choose projects in other fields, which means that we would particularly encourage strong applicants with very good academic marks and previous research experience to apply. 

Please follow the links below for more information. 

Newcastle-DTA PhD studentships

(1) Building brains: Which developmental pathways lead to better performance in information processing? (School: Computing Science Ref: DTA122)

Within this project, a student will help to develop detailed simulations of brain network development. In addition, the student will test the performance of the grown networks on visual tasks. Through this, we will investigate (a) how developmental mechanisms are linked to the resulting topology and (b) how the resulting network is linked to processing performance. As a result, we will get a better understanding how changes during development are linked to brain architecture and how they can lead to cognitive deficits.

Supervisors: Prof. Marcus Kaiser, Dr Gavin Clowry, and Dr Roman Bauer

(2) Predicting patient outcomes following traumatic brain injury (School: Computing Science Ref: DTA123)

In this study we will investigate the impact of simulated brain lesions using human brain connectivity data and computer simulations. We shall aim to produce biomarkers for patient outcomes. These techniques may hive wider applications in stroke, multiple sclerosis and ageing.

Supervisors: Prof. Marcus Kaiser and Dr Peter Taylor

Please apply by 22 January at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/sage/study/postgrad/dta/

Newcastle-Singapore PhD studentships

(3) Improving surgery in focal epilepsy using computational modelling (School: Computing Science Ref: NSS12)

In this project we shall attempt to predict which patients will be seizure free after surgery. For those patients predicted to be not seizure free we shall suggest alternative strategies for surgery. See also our recent article in PLOS CB: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/metrics/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1004642

Supervisors: Dr. Peter Taylor, Prof. Marcus Kaiser, and Asst. Prof. Justin Dauwels (NTU, Singapore). The student will be based at Newcastle but also visit Singapore

Please apply by 26 February at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/sage/study/postgrad/singapore/

Research Environment

There are currently 12 faculty members with a link to neuroinformatics and computational neuroscience. Using computational models for clinical applications is a strong interest of our group (see http://neuroinformatics.ncl.ac.uk/ for an overview). Students will be based in the School of Computing Science, which was ranked #9 for research and #1 for impact in the recent UK Research Excellence Framework evaluation, as part of the ICOS Group (http://ico2s.org/ ). They will also be affiliated with the Institute of Neuroscience which integrates more than 100 principal investigators across medicine, psychology, computer science, and engineering and which was ranked #9 overall and #5 for impact in the UK (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ion/). 

Newcastle University, with 20,000 students, lies in the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne -- an area in the North-East of England with around one million inhabitants. The university is at the centre of Newcastle which itself is on the main train-line between London and Edinburgh, 20 minutes away from both the airport and the sand beach by public transport (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/about/visit/city/ ). 

We also offer a one-year master programme in Computational Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/study/postgrad/taught/5199/ ) which is now accepting applications.