Doctoral Studentship

Supervisor: Dr Joe Pitt-Francis

Start Date: October 2013

This studentship is for home/EU applicants only. International students are not eligible to apply. EU applicants must have lived or studied in the UK for the previous three years to be eligible for full funding

The Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has agreed to sponsor a Doctoral “Global Challenge Studentship” at Oxford University’s Department of Computer Science in the area of Computational Healthcare. This work will be co-supervised by Dr Joe Pitt-Francis in the Computational Biology group at Oxford and Dr Martyn Winn at the STFC Daresbury Laboratory.

The studentship will be funded for a period of 3 years. STFC will cover the costs of university fees at home/EU rates and will provide an annual stipend to the student corresponding to the National Minimum Stipend (currently £13,590 per annum). The Department of Computer Science will cover the costs of the college fees.

This project is about the efficient modelling and simulation of large collections of biological cells in order to study phenomena such as normal tissue growth, tumour formation, tissue engineering and biofilms. We wish to understand how systems of biological cells behave at the functional level, and how this behaviour arises as a result of highly dynamic, strongly non-linear, tightly coupled interactions between component processes occurring across multiple spatial and temporal scales, coupled through multiple physical processes. The project focuses on enhancing the performance of discrete multiscale multicellulasimulations in order to be able to simulate realistic biomedical applications involving tens of thousands of individual cells. This will require research into areas such as parallel simulation algorithms, load balancing, and novel computing architectures, in collaboration with staff at STFC Daresbury Laboratory. The work will be carried out within the open source Chaste software framework (http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/Chaste).

We will consider students with strong scientific programming and computational modelling skills. Candidates must also have good writing, communication, presentation, and organization skills. Applicants must in addition satisfy the usual requirements for studying for a doctorate at Oxford:

http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/admissions/dphil/dphil-criteria.pdf

Applications can be made online here:

https://apply.embark.com/grad/Oxford/16/

When applying for these studentships, please quote the following studentship codes:

STFC-JMPF-WEB (if you are applying from Computer Science Departmental web pages)

STFC-JMPF-JOBS (if you are applying via jobs.ac.uk)

The closing date for applications is 31st May 2013. If you have any questions about the studentship or application process please email:  Julie.sheppard@cs.ox.ac.uk