EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training announced in Sensor Technologies and Applications.

"I am thrilled about this development", says Professor Clemens Kaminski, director of the CDT.  "Sensor research has become a vastly complex and multidisplinary activity and has to be recognised as an academic discipline in its own right.  The CDT will function like a virtual superdepartment in Cambridge, providing training for more than 50 outstanding PhD students to produce the next generation of leaders in the field."

The CDT builds on the foundations of CamBridgeSens, the University's network for sensor research.  It brings together world-leading expertise, infrastructure and people from more than 20 departments across Cambridge.  The programme will be underpinned by a consortium of industrial partners, which is tightly integrated into the CDT and through its needs and engagement will inform its direction. In the first year of their 4 year PhD programme, student cohorts will attend specialised lectures, practicals and research mini-projects, to receive training in a
range of topics underpinning sensor research, including physical principles of sensor hardware, acquisition and interpretation of sensory information, and user requirements of sensor applications. Team-building aspects will be strongly emphasised, and through an extended sensor project treated as a team challenge in the first year of their programme, the
students will together, as a cohort, face a problem of industrial relevance and learn how to address a research problem as a team rather than individually. The cohorts will be supported by a mix of academic and industrial mentors, and will receive business, presentation and project-management skills. During years 2 to 4 of their PhD course, students will pick a PhD topic offered by the more than 50 PIs participating in the CDT. Each topic on offer will be supervised by at least two academics from different departments/disciplines and may include industrial partners.

"We are now recruiting the first cohort of outstanding students for the Sensor CDT, to start in October 2014", says the programme manager of the CDT, Dr. Oliver Hadeler. "Interested students should register their interest with me as soon as possible.  The formal application portal will be open over the coming days."