PhD Computer Science

Program Overview

Join our research team to work on projects that have an impact in the real world. From optimisation for airports to machine learning for energy suppliers, we do computer science from theory to application.

The school's research topics include:

Find out more on our research webpages.

Rodrigo Pinheiro did his PhD at Nottingham. The title of his thesis was "A Computational Study and Heuristic Algorithms for the Home Healthcare Scheduling and Routing Problem" supervised by Prof Dario Landa Silva.

During his PhD, Rodrigo became the associate in a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project between the University and Webroster Ltd. The project was on optimisation for workforce scheduling and routing in home care.

Rodrigo then joined Webroster, first as Optimisation Specialist then Head of Data Science. Now, he is Head of Data Science at a new company developed to focus on the optimisation engine from the KTP and his PhD.

In the first year, you will focus on learning what research is already published and identifying gaps in knowledge. You will start to formulate your own research questions.

In year two, you'll start to answer the questions you created in year one.

In the final year, you'll finish your research and prepare for writing your thesis.

You will complete a written thesis of up to 100,000 words, with expert support and advice from your academic supervisor(s). You will also take a verbal examination called a viva voce where you explain your project in-depth to an examination panel.

You'll meet with your supervisor at least 10 times per year. Most of our students have 15-20 meetings per year.

Our research groups hold regular seminars which PhD students can attend.

We do our best to support students to attend conferences when they have papers to present.

Hear more about what life is like in the school from current PhD students.

In the 2019 Postgraduate Research Experience Survey, the School of Computer Science was ranked highly in: