Research degrees

PhD Student in laboratory

A vibrant research community

The STEM research community supports over 300 postgraduate research students, of whom around 200 are full time based on the University's Milton Keynes campus, where they work alongside some 130 post-doctoral research fellows and assistants. A further 200 postgraduate research students are registered with our Affiliated Research Centres.

A majority of faculty academic staff are research active, publishing many hundreds of academic journal articles each year. Income from externally funded research projects currently exceeds £15 million per annum from a variety of sources - including research councils, the European Union, the European Space Agency, the UK Space Agency and charitable and industrial sponsors.

The Faculty supports an exceptional programme of post-graduate training delivered face to face and via the on-line ‘Virtual Research Environment’, providing an organised and structured means by which students can both assess their research skills and plan the development and acquisitions of these skills during the course of their PhD.

Research degree opportunities

For details on post-graduate studentship projects for the current year, along with details on what our schools and institute can offer you, please visit:

While the vast majority of our PhD students are full-time, supervisors in the Faculty may consider applications for part-time study that fall broadly within their areas of expertise but it's unlikely that laboratory facilities can be made available to part-time students. You should therefore not consider laboratory-based projects unless you already work in a laboratory that would allow facilities for your research, or unless you can make arrangements to use other laboratory facilities in your vicinity.