The School of Computing welcomes applications for our Computer Science research programmes.
Your research should produce an original contribution in your chosen field of study. You work closely with your supervisor, a member of academic staff, who is your principal source of support. If you choose a research area that has interdisciplinary aspects, you may have more than one supervisor. In addition to regular supervision, you will be supported by a supervisory panel of three academic staff who provide further structured input and guidance.
We offer an extensive support framework to all our research students. We support you in becoming an effective researcher through a series of weekly workshops taken in the first year. These cover research-specific subjects including how to access journals and review research publications, how to write and publish academic articles and how to present your work at seminars and conferences. You may also attend workshops on key transferable skills including communication, time management and teamwork.
You join one or more of our well-integrated, active research groups where you will be able to test and discuss your ideas and place your research in a broader context.
We host a seminar series for visiting speakers as well as holding regular seminars within our research groups where research students are encouraged to participate. We also host an annual postgraduate conference where you have the opportunity to both present your work and to gain experience as a conference organiser.
Many of our research students earn money by teaching on our undergraduate programmes. We provide teaching development courses in your first year to give you the skills to teach effectively.
Our world-leading researchers, in key areas such as systems security, programming languages, communications, computational intelligence and memory management, and in interdisciplinary work with biosciences and psychology, earned us an outstanding result in the most recent national research assessment.
Our programmes are taught and supervised by leading researchers who are experts in their fields. The School of Computing at Kent is home to several authors of leading computer science textbooks.
We have strong links with industry including IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.
A first or 2.1 degree or advanced/specialist taught MSc in computer science or a related discipline (such as mathematics, business studies or electronics, as long as the degree has a strong computing component).
All applicants are considered on an individual basis and additional qualifications, professional qualifications and relevant experience may also be taken into account when considering applications.
Please see our International Student website for entry requirements by country and other relevant information. Due to visa restrictions, students who require a student visa to study cannot study part-time unless undertaking a distance or blended-learning programme with no on-campus provision.
The University requires all non-native speakers of English to reach a minimum standard of proficiency in written and spoken English before beginning a postgraduate degree. Certain subjects require a higher level.
For detailed information see our English language requirements web pages.
Please note that if you are required to meet an English language condition, we offer a number of pre-sessional courses in English for Academic Purposes through Kent International Pathways.
If you choose the MSc by research option, you will study for one year full-time (two years part-time).
As a PhD student you study for a minimum of three years to a maximum of four years full-time, or a minimum of five years to a maximum of six years part-time.
The 2024/25 annual tuition fees for this course are:
Computer Science - MSc by Research at Canterbury
Computer Science - PhD at Canterbury
For details of when and how to pay fees and charges, please see our Student Finance Guide.
For students continuing on this programme fees will increase year on year by no more than RPI + 3% in each academic year of study except where regulated.* If you are uncertain about your fee status please contact information@kent.ac.uk.
The University will assess your fee status as part of the application process. If you are uncertain about your fee status you may wish to seek advice from UKCISA before applying.
Find out more about general additional costs that you may pay when studying at Kent.
Search our scholarships finder for possible funding opportunities. You may find it helpful to look at both:
We have a range of subject-specific awards and scholarships for academic, sporting and musical achievement.
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In the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, 100% of our Computer Science and Informatics research was classified as either 'world-leading' or 'internationally excellent' for impact.
If you are keen to pursue a research degree, each of the School of Computing's five research groups has suggested projects: do contact the project proposers or the head of research group to tell us that you are interested.
Our research involves all aspects of programming languages and systems, from fundamental theory to practical implementation. The Group has interests across a wide range of programming paradigms: object-oriented, concurrent, functional and logic. We research the links between logic and programming languages, the verification of the correctness of programs, and develop tools for refactoring, tracing and testing. We are interested in incorporating safe concurrent programming practices into language design.
The Group is also interested in practical implementation of programming languages, from massively concurrent parallel processing to batteryoperated mobile systems. Particular research topics include lightweight multi-threading kernels, highly concurrent operating systems, memory managers and garbage collectors.
Research areas include:
This Group brings together interdisciplinary researchers investigating the interface between computer science and the domains of bioscience and cognition. In terms of applying computation to other domains, we have experts in investigating the modelling of gene expression and modeling of human attention, emotions and reasoning. From the perspective of applying biological metaphors to computation, we research new computational methods such as genetic algorithms and swarm intelligence.
The Group also develops novel techniques for data mining, visualisation and simulation. These use the results of interdisciplinary research for finding solutions to computationally expensive problems.
The Group has strong links with other schools at the University of Kent, as well as with universities, hospitals and scientific research institutes throughout the country and internationally.
Areas of research activity within the group include:
Security - of information, systems, and communications - has become a central issue in our society. Interaction between people's personal devices (far beyond just phones and computers) and the rest of the connected world is nearly continuous; and with the advent of the Internet Of Things its scope will only grow.
In that context, so much can go wrong - every communication can potentially be intercepted, modified, or spoofed, and surreptitiously obtained data can be commercially exploited or used for privacy invasions. In fact, data flows in society are such that many people already feel they have lost control over where (their) data goes.
The cyber security research group operates within that context. All members bring a particular technological emphasis - the analysis of particular classes of security problems or their solutions - but are fully aware that it all fits within a wider context of people using systems and communicating data in secure and insecure ways, and how external pressures beyond the mere technology impact on that. The topic of computer security then naturally widens to include topics like privacy, cyber crime, and ethics and law relating to computing, as well as bringing in aspects of psychology, sociology and economics.
From that perspective, the Cyber Security research group played a key role in setting up, and continues to be a core contributor to, the University's Interdisciplinary Cyber Security Research Centre, see www.cybersecurity.kent.ac.uk.
The group has a strong involvement with postgraduate teaching in this area. It teaches most of the core modules in MSc programmes in Computer Security, and Networks and Security. A new (from September 2017) MSc Course in Cyber Security has been provisionally certified by GCHQ. The group is also involved in undergraduate modules in this area, postgraduate programmes in other schools and UK activities to define curricula in Cyber Security.
Members are engaged in the following areas of research (research areas in more detail) .
Data Science is about developing new techniques to better understand data and draws on many areas within and outside of computer science. Our research group develops and applies methods to interpret rich information sources.Our research comes under three themes:
Kent’s world-class academics provide research students with excellent supervision. The academic staff in this school and their research interests are shown below. You are strongly encouraged to contact the school to discuss your proposed research and potential supervision prior to making an application. Please note, it is possible for students to be supervised by a member of academic staff from any of Kent’s schools, providing their expertise matches your research interests. Use our ‘find a supervisor’ search to search by staff member or keyword.
Full details of staff research interests can be found on the School's website.
Many research students choose to continue their careers by working in academia. Our graduates have also gone on to work in:
Recent graduates have gone on to develop successful careers at leading companies such as:
The University has a friendly Careers and Employability Service, which can give you advice on how to:
We provide an extensive support framework for our research students and encourage involvement in the international research community.
The School of Computing has a large range of equipment providing both UNIX (TM) and PCbased systems and a cluster facility consisting of 30 Linux-based PCs for parallel computation. New resources include a multi-core enterprise server with 128 hardware threads and a virtual machine server that supports computer security experiments.
All students benefit from a well-stocked library, giving access to e-books and online journals as well as books, and a high bandwidth internet gateway. The School and its research groups hold a series of regular seminars presented by staff as well as by visiting speakers and our students are welcome to attend.
Our full-time research students are offered funds for academic conference travel, to assist in publishing papers and getting involved in the international community. You have your own desk and PC/laptop in a research office, which is shared by other research students. We also provide substantial support, principally via one-to-one supervision of research students and well-integrated, active research groups, where you have the opportunity to test and discuss your ideas in a friendly environment.
Staff and research students publish regularly and widely in journals, conference proceedings and books. Among others, they have recently contributed to: Journal of Artificial Evolution and Applications; International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking; Journal of Visual Languages and Computing; Journal in Computer Virology.
Strong links with industry underpin all our work, notably with Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Agilent Technologies, Erlang Solutions, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Ericsson and Nexor.
Kent's Graduate School co-ordinates the Researcher Development Programme for research students, which includes workshops focused on research, specialist and transferable skills. The programme is mapped to the national Researcher Development Framework and covers a diverse range of topics, including subject-specific research skills, research management, personal effectiveness, communication skills, networking and teamworking, and career management skills.
Learn more about the application process or begin your application by clicking on a link below.
You will be able to choose your preferred year of entry once you have started your application. You can also save and return to your application at any time.
T: +44 (0)1227 823254
E: internationalstudent@kent.ac.uk
