Research with us

Ernest Rutherford Fellowships are five year fellowships funded by the STFC (formerly STFC Advanced Fellowships). The 2024 Ernest Rutherford Fellowships will open in June 2024 with the final submission deadline to be 1 October 2024. They will be open to candidates of any nationality, but each institution is limited in the total number of applications it can support, at the ICG we are only able to support 3 proposals. We require candidates to send a statement of interest by 27th June 2024 to be considered for one of these fellowships. Please complete the template and send it to icg-recruitment@port.ac.uk. More details about the process can be found on the expression of interest template. We encourage you to contact an ICG staff member, or our Deputy Director of Research (ian.harry@port.ac.uk) if you are interested in applying for an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship with us.

We encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds and those returning to research from career breaks.

For further information see https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/ernest-rutherford-fellowship-2024/

Royal Society University Research Fellowships are eight year fellowships open to researchers of all nationalities. The 2024 Royal Society University Research Fellowships will open on 11 July 2024 with a deadline of 10 September 2024.  Please contact an ICG staff member, or our Deputy Director for Research (ian.harry@port.ac.uk) before the end of July 2024 if you are interested in applying in the 2024 round. There is no limit on how many applicants we can support in making an application to this scheme but it does take some time to put together an application.

For full details on the University Research Fellowships scheme please see https://royalsociety.org/grants/university-research/

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie scheme includes Individual Fellowships intended to add significantly to the development of the best and most-promising researchers active in Europe. These are for trans-national researchers, including researchers coming to Europe and those moving within Europe. There is currently an open call for 2024 Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellows with a deadline to apply of 2024. Please contact an ICG staff member, or our Deputy Director for Research (ian.harry@port.ac.uk) before the end of July 2024 if you are interested in applying in the 2024 round. There is no limit on how many applicants we can support in making an application to this scheme but it does take some time to put together an application.

Brexit does not affect the eligibility of UK nationals and/or UK institutes to apply for, or to act as a host for Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions. As the UK has now rejoined the Horizon Europe framework, we will be fully eligible for any future ERC opportunities, including this one.

For more information on the current round of Individual Fellowships, please see https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/calls/msca-postdoctoral-fellowships-2024

For more details on other Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions please see
http://ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/

Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships offer a recognised first step into an independent research career for outstanding scientists and engineers at an early stage of their research career who require a flexible working pattern due to personal circumstances, such as parenting or caring responsibilities or health issues. The next round of Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships will open on 03 September 2024 with a submission date of 29 October 2024. Please contact an ICG staff member, or our Deputy Director for Research (ian.harry@port.ac.uk), before mid-September 2024 if you are interested in applying in the 2024 round. There is no limit on how many applicants we can support in making an application to this scheme but it does take some time to put together an application.

For further information see https://royalsociety.org/grants/dorothy-hodgkin-fellowship/

Daphne Jackson Fellowships offer STEM professionals the opportunity to return to a research career after a break of two or more years for a family, health or caring reason. It is the opportunity to balance a personalised retraining programme with a challenging research project, held in a supportive UK university or research establishment. It is possible to apply for a Daphne Jackson Fellowship at any time. If interested in applying, please contact an ICG staff member with a connection to the proposed research.

For more information, please see here https://daphnejackson.org/about-fellowships/

Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellowships and the Norman Lockyer Fellowship provide support for up to 3 years for early career research astronomers and geophysicists. Applications are restricted to candidates who have a recognized PhD (or equivalent) obtained no more than 5 years before the start of their position or who have taken their viva before the application deadline and expect to be awarded the PhD by the time of appointment. These are offered on a 3-year cycle, and the next opportunity will be in 2024 (deadline not yet announced).

For further information see https://www.ras.ac.uk/awards-and-grants/fellowships/2330-fellowship-call

Future Leaders Fellowships will grow the strong supply of talented individuals needed to ensure a vibrant environment for research and innovation in the UK. The scheme is open to researchers and innovators from across business, universities, and other organisations.

The 9th Future Leaders Fellowship scheme has now closed. We will update this page when the 10th call to this scheme opens. University of Portsmouth is able to submit a limited number of Future Leaders Fellowship applications and so an internal selection process is needed to select these from across the University. If you are interested in submitting a Future Leaders Fellowship application with the ICG, please contact one of our faculty as soon as possible who can guide you in the process.

The Royal Society Career Development Fellowships provide the most talented early career scientists from underrepresented groups in STEM with research funding and high-quality training opportunities to build a strong base for a successful research career.

The first call for these fellowships will opened in 7 November 2023 with a submission deadline of 24 January 2024. The scheme initially ran "as a pilot with researchers from Black heritage. If successful, the pilot may be broadened to researchers from other underrepresented groups." We await news of the next call for this fellowship. If interested in applying please contact one of our faculty who can help guide your application.

For more information see https://royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/grants/career-development-fellowship

Royal Society Newton International Fellowships are for non-UK scientists who are at an early stage of their research career and wish to conduct research in the UK. This 2024 scheme is now closed, and we await details of the 2025 call (normally with deadline in February - March). If interested in applying, please contact an ICG staff member with a connection to the proposed research.

For further information see https://royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/grants/newton-international/.
 

If we apply the laws of General Relativity (GR) to the universe, we are forced to conclude that 70% of its energy content consists of an inexplicably small cosmological constant. This bizarre conclusion has led cosmologists to pursue an alternative explanation: that instead the laws of gravity may deviate from GR on some distance or energy scales.

One place such departures from GR may characteristically show up are the nonlinear (small) scales of the cosmic web. In this PhD project, you’ll work on developing key tools to predict how the cosmic web is affected by modified theories of gravity. You’ll use computer codes that simulate the collapse of dark matter in 3D, and implement unusual features of modified gravity models into these codes. We’ll extract observable predictions from these simulations (e.g. weak lensing quantities), and use modern machine learning techniques such as emulators, to connect the output predictions of your simulations to data . You’ll have opportunities to be involved in cosmology with the Vera Rubin Observatory, a world-leading 8.4m telescope due to start operations in 2025, that can put modified gravity to the test.

Email tessa.baker@port.ac.uk for more details.

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) are bright flares that occur when a star is shredded by the gravitational field of a supermassive black hole. TDEs were suggested to exist in the 1980s and first discovered in the late 1990s. To date, roughly 150 TDE candidates have been discovered, and we routinely discover a handful of new events every year. Today, the study of TDEs is a vibrant young field with many open questions. Chief among them is the physics that gives rise to the flare. As the star is disrupted, half of its gas is expected to fall into the supermassive black hole. Due to the angular momentum of the star, the disrupted gas will circularize into an accretion disk. Several competing models attempt to explain how the flare is emitted during this process. To constrain these models and acquire a better understanding of TDEs, my group measures the rates of these events, studies the properties of the galaxies in which they occur, and detects and studies the linked phenomenon of extreme coronal line emitting galaxies. In this project, you will use data from the ongoing Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and the 4-metre Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (4MOST) TiDES survey to study the host-galaxies of both TDEs and extreme coronal line emitting galaxies. This project will require you to analyze galaxy spectra and search for correlations between the derived galaxy properties and properties of the TDEs that explode within them. Through this project, you will gain a deep understanding of the physics of TDEs, the supermassive black holes that create them, and the galaxies that host both.

Email or.graur@port.ac.uk for more details.

The epoch at which life first appeared in the Universe remains one of the great, open questions in astronomy. Recent cosmological simulations by my research group have shown that the first water in the Universe formed in the debris of primordial (Pop III) supernovae (SNe) 100 Myr after the Big Bang. This water became heavily concentrated in the only cosmic structures capable of forming new stars. Our numerical simulations have now revealed that some of these structures collapsed into protoplanetary disks with rocky planetesimals in the habitable zones of long-lived, low-mass stars in water mass fractions that were only a factor of a few below those in the Solar System today. For this project the PhD student will investigate water and planet formation in a broader range of Pop III SNe and then in primitive galaxies at redshifts z ~ 15 with the Enzo adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) cosmology code. They can also work with our offsite planet formation partners at Vienna and Kyoto on protoplanetary disk formation at cosmic Dawn with the FEOSAD code as well as model water emission lines from the first galaxies with the RADMC-3D Monte Carlo radiative transfer code. Besides producing truly transformational science, this project will confer valuable experience with large-scale cosmological simulations, high-performance computing (HPC), and visualization and analysis of large datasets with the Python package yt.

Email daniel.whalen@port.ac.uk for more details.

A period of accelerated expansion in the evolution of our Universe at ultra-high energies can give rise to the initial conditions required for the successful hot big bang model. Inflation gives rise to both the remarkable uniformity seen on cosmological scales, and also the distribution of fluctuations in the temperature and density of the primordial plasma, observed most directly in the cosmic microwave background sky. The evolution of adiabatic field fluctuations during slow-roll inflation is generally well-understood; linear and nonlinear tools have been developed over recent years which successfully describe the distribution of primordial density perturbations resulting from initial quantum vacuum fluctuations.

In this project we will consider fluctuations generated by transient and non-adiabatic evolution during inflation which is much less well understood. This can be induced by features in the inflaton potential, particle production or phase transitions in multi-field models. Non-adiabatic perturbations can lead to strong scale dependence and non-Gaussianity in the distribution of primordial density fluctuations after inflation. This may occur across a wide range of scales that are poorly constrained by current CMB observations, but can be probed by future observations, including galaxy surveys and gravitational wave experiments. This study will include a combination of analytic and numerical work.

Email david.wands@port.ac.uk for more details.

The standard model of cosmology is based on assuming a homogeneous and isotropic model for the spacetime of the whole Universe. This is well justified, given the success of this model in explaining observations. Perhaps the biggest fundamental problem in cosmology is the fact that, under assumption about the matter content that where considered standard in the past, cosmological models must have a Big-Bang singularity, a boundary in spacetime where Einstein General Relativity fails. This is the essence of Hawking and Penrose singularity theorems. However, since the discovery of the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, theorists have started to explain it using Dark Energy, which typically violates the assumptions of those theorems. It is then natural to revisit the Big-Bang in this light. In recent works, we have shown that if some Dark Energy is present in the very early Universe, perhaps interacting with Dark Matter, then the Big-Bang singularity can be replaced by a bounce between a contracting phase followed by expansion, eventually leading to the Universe we observe. This project with continue to explore this possibility, in particular considering models where Dark Energy and Dark matter interact.

In view of this, the student will partly explore new models for the dark sector, partly the goal will be to go beyond the simplest assumption on the spacetime geometry that assume homogeneity and isotropy, in order to study if these symmetries can emerge naturally as a consequence of the Universe dynamics. Finally, studying inhomogeneities and gravitational waves around the bounce the project will aim at working out possible observable features of these models.

Email marco.bruni@port.ac.uk for more details.

The current standard model of cosmology, LCDM, assumes Cold Dark Matter and a cosmological constant Lambda as Dark Energy. It assumes General Relativity (GR) as the theory of gravity, but in trying to explain the formation of structures Newtonian N-body simulations are used.

This project will go beyond this approximation, exploring features of nonlinear structure formation where we may expect GR effects. With state-of-the-art cosmological observations reaching a precision of 1%, it is timely to investigate how accurate the standard theoretical predictions are.

We recently successfully applied numerical relativity codes (i.e. codes that are fully relativistic) in cosmology for the first time. This PhD project will build on these first pioneering works to further develop a fully relativistic approach to the study of large-scale structure, addressing some of the many open questions. One important goal is to establish how accurate Newtonian and “GR-corrected” codes are, also testing various Newtonian and general-relativistic approximations commonly used to model structure formation. Another open problem is that of accurately implementing relativistic initial conditions derived from perturbation theory into the nonlinear evolution. There is a number of physical questions that need investigation in full GR, from the collapse of the first structures and the relevance of spatial curvature, to how the formation of nonlinear structures affects light propagation in cosmology, ultimately affecting observations. In addition, there is a possibility that part of Cold Dark Matter is made of Primordial Black Holes, thus the project could explore the formation of these.

The student will be using publicly available codes, in particular the Einstein Toolkit for numerical relativity, developing and extending them, and will have the opportunity for external collaborations, using the relativistic codes Einstein Toolkit and GRAMSES.

Email marco.bruni@port.ac.uk for more details.

At the start of this PhD the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA detectors will be carrying out hardware upgrades in advance of the fifth observing run in 2027. During this run it is expected that we will observe hundreds of colliding black holes and/or neutron stars. It is also strongly expected that there will be multiple "multi-messenger" observations: neutron star mergers observed both with gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observatories. In this project the PhD student will work with one of the leading LVK analysis codes--PyCBC--to observe these sources. PyCBC will target two types of analysis. The first will be run in real time to identify compact binary mergers within 60 seconds of the data be taken. This rapid analysis will enable electromagnetic telescopes to be pointed at the location of merger events, and potentially observe electromagnetic counterparts. We will also attempt to observe binary neutron star mergers before the the neutron stars have collided to maximize the potential for multi-messenger science. PyCBC will also run an archival analysis, months after the data is taken, to best combine our knowledge of the instruments and the sources we are looking for to provide a definitive list of observations in the data. We will also search for "rare" compact binary mergers that are currently hard to observe, including systems on precessing orbits, systems with high mass ratio and/or systems with large eccentricity.

Email ian.harry@port.ac.uk for more details.

This PhD project will investigate the dynamics of collapse and bounce within black holes, exploring whether such phenomena can provide insight into the origins of the universe and the mechanisms driving cosmic acceleration. Traditional black hole models describe a one-way journey to a singularity; however, recent theoretical developments suggest that a collapsing structure within a black hole could experience a bounce, leading to re-expansion. This project will study the physical conditions under which a bounce may occur, employing advanced relativistic models and simulations to examine the role of quantum effects and energy conditions.

By analyzing black hole collapse and bounce scenarios, this work will probe the possibility that our universe’s expansion originated from a similar process—offering a novel perspective on the Big Bang itself. Furthermore, the research will explore whether the dynamics within black holes can mirror the mechanisms behind the observed accelerated expansion of the universe, potentially linking black hole physics to cosmological phenomena on the largest scales. This thesis will build on recent theoretical frameworks and utilize numerical methods to model these processes, contributing to a deeper understanding of both black hole interiors and cosmic evolution.

Email enrique.gaztanaga@port.ac.uk for more details

Large-sky surveys are mapping our Universe across billions of light-years, with the aim of testing the behaviour of gravity across distances yet to be explored. This will shed light on phenomena such as inflation in the early Universe and also test if late-time accelerated expansion is caused by dark energy or instead, some modification to general relativity.

The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), will be the world's largest observatory once constructed and will conduct an unprecedented spectroscopic survey of the Universe. By observing radiation from neutral hydrogen at 21cm radio wavelengths, the underlying large-scale cosmic structure can be mapped in a process known as 21cm intensity mapping.

In this PhD project, you will develop cutting-edge techniques to analyse these intensity maps. You will test your codes on state-of-the-art simulations, plus real data from MeerKAT (the SKAO precursor) and some of the first observations from the SKAO. You will be required to overcome challenges unique to 21cm intensity mapping and have the opportunity to detect cosmological phenomena at radio wavelengths for the first time. The project will also give you experience working at the forefront of international collaborations.

Email david.bacon@port.ac.uk for more details.

In the last decade the ground-based gravitational-wave detector LIGO has gone through a series of hardware upgrades to improve its sensitivity. As such in every subsequent observing run the number of gravitational waves detected from compact binary mergers, in particular stellar mass binary black hole mergers, has sharply increased. In the next observing run (O5) which will start halfway through this PhD, we expect to observe gravitational waves every day.

One half of this project will focus on ways in which we can improve the estimation of gravitational-wave parameters by developing novel software techniques to overcome the detector noise which can bias results. We will also analyse the exciting new O5 data as it is coming in. There is also an opportunity for an extended stay at one of the LIGO observatories.

Building on from this work we will look to the future LISA space mission, due for launch in the mid 2030s. Detector noise and gaps within the data from this instrument will be a stumbling block for our current methods to characterise a supermassive black hole merger. We will develop new ways to overcome these issues to ensure we can accurately find and understand the nature of black holes that LISA is sensitive to.

Email laura.nuttall@port.ac.uk for more details.

The emitted energy of galaxies results from billions of stars, from diverse stellar generations spanning ranges of age, chemical composition, initial mass function, etc. Understanding galaxy formation and evolution on cosmic timescales relies on predictions for a galaxy spectral energy distribution as a function of these physical parameters, so-called evolutionary population synthesis models. The advent of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) allows unprecedented observations of primordial galaxies, from the rest-frame ultraviolet to the near-IR. Initial data from the telescope revealed distinct absorption and emission line patterns, indicating specific enrichments in Carbon, Nitrogen, etc. Maraston and collaborators have pioneered evolutionary population synthesis model spectra as a function of chemical abundance ratios at optical wavelengths. However, a parallel effort in the ultraviolet  and near- IR rest-frame remains largely unexplored. The primary objective of this theoretical project is to compute model spectra from the ultraviolet to the near-IR with arbitrary chemical element ratios. The models developed in this project will be utilized to study galaxy evolution using galaxy simulations and JWST data.

Email claudia.maraston@port.ac.uk for more details.