10 fully funded PhD positions at the Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security for the Everyday

We are currently accepting applications to Royal Holloway’s Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Cyber Security for the Everyday. We have 10 fully funded PhD positions that all centre on information security, in the broadest understanding of the term. This includes research grounded in the social sciences. For information about the research carried out by past and current CDT students - as well as details about the CDT programme - check out the CDT website.

The CDT is hosted in the Information Security Group and the research we do also spans a range of areas in information security, as does our research seminar series.

To give you a sense of the social science work in the department, this is grounded in the social foundations of information security. Drawing on social science disciplines it grounds technology and security notions, questions and approaches in the social environments of individuals, groups, communities. It employs interpretive approaches to study the underlying social processes, structures and relations to interrogate the assumptions of security technology practice and design, using exploratory and participatory methods of inquiry. Personally, I am lucky to be working with some amazing CDT students with backgrounds in a broad range of social science disciplines, some of whom I co-supervise with colleagues in other departments.

Here are some sample projects, loosely defined and in no way prescriptive - just to give you some ideas:

• I’m always keen to supervise projects using ethnographic methods to unearth security needs, practices and experiences, particularly among higher-risk and/or marginalised groups.
• Together with my colleague Martin Albrecht, we want to explore security needs and practices in large-scale protests using ethnographic methods. We’ve done an interview-based pilot study with protesters in Hong Kong and think grounding cryptographic security notions in the protesters’ needs will prove rather fruitful.
• My colleague Peter Adey (Geography) is looking at the intersection of (information) security and human, cultural, political geography. And together with Keith Martin is looking at the social and cryptographic underpinnings of contact tracing.

While most of the 10 PhD positions are reserved for UK residents, we can award three of the studentships without any such constraints, i.e. to international applicants. The studentships include tuition fees and maintenance (£21,285 for each academic year).

Feel free to get in touch if you have questions and check out the CDT website for more information and how to apply.