School of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering

The School very much welcomes enquiries from individuals wishing to study for postgraduate research degrees, such as MPhil and EngD/Phd degrees. (Typical duration two or three-and-a-half years.)

We have internationally active research staff in our three research divisions who are ready to provide further details of possible project opportunities:

• Energy (Head, Dr Simon Watson)
• Communications (Head, Dr James Flint)
• Systems (Head, Prof Roy Kalawsky)

We provide our postgraduate researchers with the very best facilities and we encourage publication of research findings in the foremost technical journals, such as those of the IEEE and IET. Our researchers also commonly have opportunity to present their research findings at the leading international conferences in their field and to work with UK industry to ensure their work has maximum impact. For further project specific enquiries, please contact initially the head of the appropriate division, or, for more general enquiries within the School regarding postgraduate research study please contact Mrs Julie Allen

How to Apply
Application procedures and other information – including an online application form - are available on the University’s Postgraduate Prospectus.

The following PhD projects are currently being researched:

Mr Daniel Browne

Application of Multicore Desktop and Cluster Computing to the Transmission Line Matrix Method (TLM)

Yu Sun

Biomedical Photonics Engineering

Ryan Imms

Cardiac Morphogenesis Research Focusing on the Tetralogy of Fallot

Danny Bayliss

Cold Atmospheric Gas Plasmas: Towards Elucidating Bacterial Inactivation Mechanisms

Miss Kirsty Mckay

Compuational modelling of low-temperature atmospheric-pressure plasmas

Adam Thirkill

CREST

Francisco Javier Aparicio Navarro

Cross Layer Techniques for Intrusion Tolerant Networks

Carlos Castello Beltran

Detection of reactive species generated in low-temperature atmospheric-pressure plasmas for application in the health and food industries

Graeme Hodgson

Distributed demand side management as a mechanism to reduce energy consumption and minimise carbon production in the generation mix

Mr Craig Grocott

Drawing Capability Metrics from a Simulation-led Systems Engineering Process. (Working title)

Ian Cole

Energy Rating of Concentrating Photovoltaic Systems

Mr Nick Wright

Health Monitoring for a Neutral Beam Heating System

Zhengfei Wei

High efficiency Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells using both vacuum and non-vacuum processing methods.

Mr David Candler

Hybrid, ESL/RTL Architectures for Accelerating Molecular Dynamics Codes

William Johnson

Identifying and Controlling High Level Structures in Complex Adaptive Systems and Networks

Jie Wang

Intrusion Detection

Mr Huseyin Dogan

Investigate and identify improvements for managing knowledge within the context of capability engineering

Mrs Sofia Ahlberg Pilfold

Measuring and Managing Knowledge for Through Life Capability

Mr Nick Glynn

Microelectronics for Biomedical applications.

Tariq Abdulla

Multiscale modeling of heart morphogenesis

Mr Brian Goss

Optimisation of market ready Solar Photovoltaic technologies

Mr Amod Jai Ganesh Anandkumar

Robust Game-Theoretic Algorithms for Distributed Resource Allocation in Wireless Communications

Mr Ludovic Krundel

Self-Reconfiguring Micro-Architectures

Craig Wright

Simulating overload of aircrew attention for optimal training benefit

Mr Abideen Tetlay

Socio-technical Modelling to Support Development of Command and Control (C2) Systems

Mr Darryl Friend

Synthetic Environments within a Flight Simulation (working title)

Hazlina Md Yusof

Technologies and Control Strategies for Active Railway Suspension Actuators

Rui Li

The cross layer measurement on hybrid wireless network

Petri Vitiello

Understanding Emergent Properties Resulting from Inter-discipline, Multi-parameter Complex System Models. (working title)

LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY RESEARCH DEGREE
IN COLLABORATION WITH
NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH “DEMOKRITOS”
Topics of the joint PhD projects
Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications (National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, GR)
School of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering
(Loughborough University Loughborough, UK)

Metamaterials for communications antennas (1 position)
Recently, there is a growing research interest regarding the study and the development of artificial composite materials with periodic structures constructed from repeated dielectric and/or metallic elements. These artificial structures, called "metamaterials", can be designed to exhibit specific electromagnetic properties not commonly found in nature. Unique metamaterial properties such as negative refraction index, and reversal of the Doppler the Cerenkov effect in radio/micro-wave frequency band can be used in electromagnetic lensing and cloaking applications. The rapid growth in periodic structures research with lensing and cloaking influences the design of future antennas to be low profile and aesthetically pleasing. A large number of antenna designs based on the use of metamaterials have been proposed recently to improve the characteristics of antennas (antenna size reduction, bandwidth and directivity enhancement etc). This PhD project will look at the various concepts and adopt suitable engineering design methodologies to obtain know–how in manufacture processes of communication antennas using metamaterials.

Multisensory signal processing for the perception of human activity inside smart spaces (1 position)
In recent years we have witnessed increasing research efforts aiming at the automatic detection, tracking, and indexing of human activity inside smart spaces that are appropriately equipped with a network of far-field audio and visual sensors. Example scenarios of interest in these efforts include professional meetings or lectures taking place inside smart conference rooms / classrooms, where the presence, activities, and conversations of the participants may be automatically tracked offering automatic minutes, summarization, and analysis, as well as the area of ambient assisted living inside smart homes, where detection of short time-span safety issues such as falls, or flagging of longer-span behavioral issues such as deviations or abrupt interruption of the daily routine / activities of daily living can prove crucial for the well-being of the elderly living alone. Of course, for the above scenarios to materialize, it is important that the technology for automatic sensing and tracking of humans and their activities becomes sufficiently robust to numerous, well-known challenges in far-field audio-visual sensing, such as noise, overlap, lighting variations, and occlusions. These challenges are most often prohibitive in single-sensory far-field environments. The aim of the envisaged thesis work will be to appropriately recruit multisensory information to mitigate the effects of these difficulties, thus reaching sufficiently robust performance in the automatic perception of human activity in the scenarios of interest. The focus of the thesis will in particular be on the development, theoretical and practical study of an appropriate fusion (integration) framework of such multisensory information in realistic environments, where the quality (information content) of each source varies continuously. The framework is envisaged to allow for integration of sensors of the same or different modality (microphone arrays, camera networks) and will be applied on a small number of specific tasks within the “universe” of human activity sensing, such as the problems of person tracking and speaker diarization.  It is expected that readily available databases in the literature will be employed for the development and evaluation of such framework, although collection of new database resources and the development of relevant demo systems may also be pursued.