The studentship will cover tuition fees for the full-time duration at the standard postgraduate ‘Home’ rate (£5,238 for 2026/27) or ‘International’ rate (£23,950 for 2026/27), plus a combined maintenance grant equivalent to the Research Councils UK National Minimum Doctoral Stipend (£21,805 for 2026/27, with yearly inflationary uplift) for the 3.5 years. Included is a travel budget (£15,000 total) and contingency funding.
The deadline for this scholarship for a 2027 April start is Tuesday 22nd of December 2026 23:59 GMT
Successful candidates will demonstrate academic excellence, outstanding research potential. Applicants should have, or expect to obtain, a first or upper second-class honours degree in a relevant subject, and ideally a Master’s degree or equivalent. The studentship is open to Home and Overseas (including EU) students.
Appropriate candidates should have:
The University of Kent requires all non-native speakers of English to hold a minimum standard of proficiency in written and spoken English before beginning a postgraduate degree. For more information on English language requirements, please visit this page.
The PhD scholarship aims to develop new programming language techniques to Design Computation in architecture and engineering. Design Computation (DC) leverages computation to generate building designs, manage the associated data, and evaluate decision decisions; programs are written to generate designs rather than the CAD approach of constructing designs directly. At the heart of DC is programming, which must then be expressed in some programming language(s). This PhD project responds to the challenge: how can the unique ways of collaborative thinking and reasoning, which characterise the multi-disciplinary design of physical architecture and building engineering, be supported by new forms of programming languages, systems, and tools? The funding for this 3.5-year scholarship (open to both Home and International students) is kindly provided with the support of Buro Happold who will act as an industrial partner throughout this PhD project. The candidate will be supported by collaboration with the advanced industrial practice within the sponsoring organisation. Travel funding is also included.
One view of programming languages research is as an open-ended exploration into the way people and computers can express and comprehend logic and reasoning in an executable form. The goal of this PhD project is to apply this research theme to another equally open-ended process of exploration, that of advanced physical architecture and building engineering via Design Computation.
Design Computation (DC) is an approach in architecture, engineering, and construction that leverages computation to generate building designs, manage the associated data, and evaluate decision decisions [1]. DC differs to CAD-based design modelling, where the designer uses interactive geometry applications to manually create the finished building design. With this form of direct modelling there are no opportunities to record the rationale for the design and any subsequent design exploration requires further arduous manual edits. In Design Computation however, programs are written to generate the designs themselves as their output, explicitly programming the logic and method of its realisation, and enabling design intent to be more easily captured. The modification and re-execution of the program allows the designer to efficiently explore a larger solution space of alternatives or other forms of optimisation.
At the heart of DC is programming, which must then be expressed in some programming language or languages. Both textual programming languages and visual programming languages are widely deployed in this space; some of these are general purpose and others are specialised, used only in these domains.
This PhD project responds to the challenge: how can the unique ways of collaborative thinking and reasoning, which characterise the multi-disciplinary design of physical architecture and building engineering, be supported by new forms of programming languages, programming systems, and programming tools?
The funding for this international scholarship is kindly provided with the support of Buro Happold who will act as an industrial partner throughout this PhD project. To help answer the particular challenges addressed in this PhD, the candidate will be supported by collaboration with the advanced industrial practice within the sponsoring organisation. This will provide both the opportunity to gain insight from industry engineers in industry, and to consider the route to impact and deployment.
This is an opportunity for some original language research; the potential exists for the ideas and methods developed in this specific domain to evolve into more general-purpose programming paradigms (following in the path of important historical precedents).
A recent position paper [2] by the primary supervisor, external partner, and industrial sponsor sets out a vision of problems faced in DC and possible areas for exploration. For more details see: https://plas4sci.github.io/pl4dc-phd
The University of Kent is committed to equality, diversity, widening participation and inclusion and we endeavour to recruit students from all walks of life. We encourage enquiries and applications from all sections of the community regardless of gender, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation and transgender status.
Enquiries should be directed to the PGR Admissions team; pgradmissions@kent.ac.uk
[1] Aish, Robert & Bredella, Nathalie. (2017). “The evolution of architectural computing: from Building Modelling to Design Computation”. Architectural Research Quarterly. 21. 65-73. 10.1017/S1359135517000185.
[2] Aish, Robert, et al. "Programming languages for the future of design computation." Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software. 2024.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3689492.3689812
Please apply for a Computer Science PhD. As part of the process, students should include the following: