National Lab Doctoral Programme Launching Autumn 2025
Come research with us!
CoSTAR National Lab is offering funding for up to nine PhD students for September/October 2025 entry.
Applicants need to be based at either Royal Holloway, University of London, University of Surrey/Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI or Abertay University, and will have access to world-class research and training environments, enhanced by the creative industries partners of the CoSTAR National Lab including Pinewood Studios, BT, Disguise and the National Film & Television School.
We are looking for PhD candidates with academic excellence, passion for research and evidence of working effectively as part of a team.
The PhD research topics align with the wider CoSTAR National Lab research programmes called ‘Futures’. These are designed to focus on innovation and address challenges set by industry:
Creative Futures – taking the best of sector creativity to enable the application of emergent technologies to current and future opportunities in screen and performance.
Business Futures – developing our understanding of ‘life-centric’ experiences for customers, adapting to their ever-changing needs and priorities.
AI Futures – embedding cutting-edge and foundational AI into creative industry pipeline helping to transform the creation, production, delivery and personalized experience of media content.
Createch Futures – seeking rich, distributed and connected interactive virtual environments, advance real-time rendering and simulation in virtual production.
User Futures – applying the understanding of human factors, human cognition, emotion and user preferences to the creation of inclusive, accessible, intuitive and engaging technologies and experiences.
Inclusive Futures – exploring principles of inclusive innovation and social justice in creative technology for marginalised users.
Topics include:
Creating and refining immersive, adaptive audio tools to enable real-time interaction with music and sound in Virtual Production
The impact of multisensory elements on live events and experiences
Audience experience of liveness in virtual music events
Inclusive innovation and assistive technology in convergent screen and performance
Advanced Production: Workflows in the wild
Advanced Production toolsets: Auto-matte intelligent auto-rotoscoping of FG elements in VP volumes
Business innovation for creative technologies
The future of digital identity and ownership
Design fictions for prototyping immersive experiences
Open toolset and pipeline for immersive creations
Single view human reconstruction in large, uncontrolled environments
Monocular self-supervised 4D semantic reconstruction of general dynamic scenes
Neutral rendering of human performances
To apply, please contact the Lead Supervisor of the PhD opportunity via email and copy your message to costar@rhul.ac.uk. You will then need to work with the Lead Supervisor to send your CV and a 500-word expression of interest by Friday 14 March 2025.
Awards cover UK tuition fees and provide a stipend at the UKRI rate for a period of three years.
For more information and to apply, please visit our website here.