PhD in Engineering: Human Factors and resilience modelling for rail disruption management, sponsored by Network Rail.

Award Summary

100% home tuition fees covered and a minimum tax-free annual living allowance of £19,237 (2024/25 UKRI rate).

Overview

This PhD will address the growing need to account for new technologies (e.g. train control and incident management systems), emerging threats (e.g. climate change), and new pressures (e.g. post-COVID shifts in passenger trends) and will consider the disruption management processes necessary to expedite incident recovery.

With a focus on decision making in distributed control rooms, the work will apply theory from the field of resilience engineering to identify the strengths and fragilities of current disruption management approaches and will capitalise on pre-existing research on i) situation awareness for train service control, ii) passenger information, and iii) disruption decision making.

PhDs will join Newcastle University’s Future Mobility Group, with secondments and field work with the relevant Network Rail teams. Opportunities to interact with the National Research Hub for Decarbonised, Adaptive and Resilient Transport Infrastructures (DARe) will also be available https://dare.ac.uk

Number Of Awards

One

Start Date

April or September 2025

Award Duration

3.5 years

Application Closing Date

9th December 2024

Sponsor

Network Rail

Supervisors

David Golightly

Eligibility Criteria

You must have, or expect to gain, a minimum 2:1 Honours degree or international equivalent in a subject relevant to the proposed PhD project (civil/environmental/mechanical engineering, computing science).  

Applicants whose first language is not English require an IELTS score of 6.5 overall with a minimum of 6.5 in all sub-skills.  

The studentship covers fees at the Home rate (UK and EU applicants with pre-settled/settled status and meet the residency criteria). International applicants are welcome to apply but will be required to cover the difference between Home and International fees.

How To Apply

You must apply through the University’s Apply to Newcastle Portal 

Once registered select ‘Create a Postgraduate Application’. 

Use ‘Course Search’ to identify your programme of study: 

·                    Search for the ‘Course Title’ using the programme code: 8090F 

·                    Research Area: Mechanical and Systems Engineering 

·                    Select ‘PhD Mechanical Engineering (full time)’ as the programme of study  

You will then need to provide the following information in the ‘Further Details’ section: 

·                    A ‘Personal Statement’ (this is a mandatory field) – upload a document or write a statement directly in to the application form 

·                    The studentship code ENG147 in the ‘Studentship/Partnership Reference’ field 

·                    When prompted regarding your research proposal – select ‘Write Proposal’. You should then type in the title of the research project from this advert. You do not need to upload a research proposal.   

Contact Details

David Golightly David.Golightly@newcastle.ac.uk