Prospective Postgraduate Research Students

Postgraduate Research

The School of Engineering has an international reputation for its research activities and currently has an annual research income of €10 million. It awards PhD, MSc by Research and MAI (Ind.) degrees. This serves to support both graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who work in a stimulating environment with modern facilities and equipment. Suitably qualified candidates can apply for registration as a graduate student working in the research areas outlined below and research funding often provides scholarships for research Masters and Doctoral students, to cover the registration, course fees and living costs of research students. Currently, there are over 110 postgraduate research students and a significant number of postdoctoral fellows and research associates, many of whom are from other European and non-European countries.

Interested candidates are advised to make direct contact with the relevant academic staff member in the first instance. Information on the research activities of the staff can be obtained from the discipline links below.

The School has an international research reputation in many topics, including water engineering, structural materials, behaviour and control, digital media processing, communications engineering, computational engineering, energy, vibrations and acoustics, fluids, fatigue, manufacturing technology, bioengineering, transport modelling, geophysical flows, climate change and geotechnical testing. The research-led school includes internationally renowned experts in their fields. Most of its research is funded through collaborative projects involving industry, the EU and national government programmes.

The principal topic areas in Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering are Structural Engineering, Renewable Energy, Environmental Engineering, Transportation (based in the TRIP research centre see https://www.tcd.ie/transport-research/), Geotechnics and Sustainability. While sustainability is high on the agenda in many disciplines in Engineering, there is a specialised research centre in the Michael McNamara Centre for Construction Innovation and Sustainability (known as TrinityHaus). The state-of-the-art laboratories, field units and the wide-ranging expertise of both the academic and the technical staff combine to create the largest civil engineering research centre in Ireland.

In Electronic and Electrical Engineering there are a number of main research areas that lie within the broad engineering discipline of Information and Communications Technology, or ICT. In Information and Communications Engineering (see https://connectcentre.ie/), activities centre on future communications systems with particular emphasis on reconfigurable and software radio, cognitive wireless networks and dynamic spectrum allocation regimes. Work in signal processing lies broadly in the areas of image/video processing, audio and acoustic signal analysis, speech recognition and synthesis and associated applications.

In ADAPT (see, https://adaptcentre.ie/), the world-leading SFI Research Centre for Digital Media Technology, staff in the School of Engineering contribute to developing next-generation digital technologies that transform how people communicate by helping to analyse, personalise and deliver digital data more effectively for businesses and individuals.

Advanced Engineering Materials and Microelectronic Technology is a well-established research area that includes the design and development of techniques for the measurement of the electrical properties of ferroelectric liquid crystals, glass-forming liquids and polymers and the magnetic and dielectric properties of nano-materials. In the microelectronics fabrication and test area, research interests include the preparation and characterisation of different structures formed on silicon.

Research in the Trinity Centre for Biomedical Engineering (TCBE) (https://www.tcd.ie/biomedicalengineering/) covers neural engineering which involves the design, development and evaluation of biomedical signal processing methods to generate active implantable devices for use in neural engineering applications. There is also work on the design and development of biomedical instrumentation primarily for clinical applications, in particular the non-invasive measurement diagnostic parameters.

Mechanical, Manufacturing and Biomedical Engineering houses excellent research and laboratory facilities. Projects are carried out by research groups specialising in Fluids, Acoustics and Vibration, Heat Transfer and Thermodynamics, and Manufacturing and Materials Engineering. Researchers in these groups lead research activities in Bioengineering and Energy Devices and Systems.

The research activities of all research groups involve significant work on the application of advanced computer-based numerical modelling and simulation for the solution of engineering problems so that there is a common theme of computer-based analysis, modelling and experimental validation in each of these areas.