If you want to do a PhD here...

As of october 2023, I may have officially less than 3 years left in the office, so it isn't clear I can take any new PhD students in Cambridge. Sorry. However:- I am also affiliated now with Imperial College (Dept of Computing and IX) so check there after oct 1 2023!

First of all, read the Lab web pages on Graduate Degree applications - note that we have a Masters programme, which makes a nice lead in to the 3 year PhD, especially if you are not certain what you want to work on, or that you want to work on it that long. See this talk for why.

I am a fellow of Wolfson College which is a jolly nice place for graduate students (Masters and PhDs) and I recommend when you are putting down a College preference when applying, but many colleges are great.

Now check my graduate management skills and sources of ideas before xkcd.

Now, have you looked at the srg and netos research web pages? I leave it as an exercise for you to find those:)

If you have done all of that, and want to apply, but want to contact us first, then that is fine. We want to see a two page proposal, Here is a Daft Example (I leave it as an exercise for you to see why:-) or else take a look at my conjectures and ideas for gadgets for more ideas of what I do and do NOT do (e.g. QoS:). Note I have written and spoken extensively about why LLMs, IoT, Blockchain, and Quantum Computing are highly suspect topics of hype. Unless you have a very novel (and not wrong, and especially not even wrong) idea how to actually fix them, please don't drink the kool-aid.

The purposes of the two page proposal is to provide us with information about what kind of problem you think is worth tackling, why, and how you might start going about solving it through research (not through mere development). This will allow us to matchmake between your application, and appropriate supervisor, and possibly see if your proposal fits in with existing projects, which would mean you would be able to work in a collaboration with other researchers, which is all part of the experience. The proposal is not a binding one - indeed, many people change 1 or 2 times in the first year before settling on the final thesis topic (see the information above for more about that). If you have published work, by all means send us this with CV info, preferably just as a URL to a web page with the information on it rather than a bunch of attachments (if you do send attachments, text, html and pdf are preferred).

In the last 3 years, I personally have received > 1200 email applications, i.e. roughly one per day. The group has around 30 students, in other words around 10 a year arrive and 10 depart. Go figure the odds.

If you've read all the way to here, then prove it by including this phrase in your first e-mail to me: "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies".