The University of Edinburgh
United Kingdom
About The University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh is the leading research university in Scotland, ranking 34th in the 2026 QS World University rankings. Founded in 1583, It is one of Scotland's four ancient universities and the sixth-oldest university in continuous operation in the English-speaking world. It is a member of several prestigious organisations, including Universitas 21, the League of European Research Universities (LERU) and the UK Russell Group of research-intensive universities. It is home to nearly 50,000 students and employs over 18,000 staff.
Researchers will be hosted at the Institute of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems (ICMCS) in the School of Physics and Astronomy. They will be part of a large and vibrant research community in statistical physics, complexity and living systems: over 20 PIs in ICMCS hold relevant expertise in theory, computation and experiment. DCs will have access to the Institute’s dedicated research clusters and relevant software and many opportunities to interact with the wider research community through research group meetings and seminar series. Workshops and other activities are regularly organised by the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics and other institutional centres. The graduate training programme is well-stablished, provided since 2004 through the Scotland-wide SUPA Graduate School.
Hosted PhD Projects
Research Project: Beyond the extensile/contractile dichotomy in active nematics
Active nematics is one of the most studied situations in active matter physics, both in theory and experiments.
Research Project: Collective tug-of-war dynamics: from molecular motors to ant groups
The emergence of directed transport as a collective behaviour of many microscopic constituents is a ubiquitous problem in the statistical physics of active particles.
Research Project: Microscopically-informed active field theories
Active field theories are widely used to study collective effects in driven systems at all levels of organisation, allowing instabilities to pattern formation to be identified.