伦敦大学学院PhD position in Multi-Length-Scale characterisation of Critical Materials申请条件要求-申请方
主办方
伦敦大学学院
PhD直招介绍
About the Project
Vacancy information
The Department of Chemical Engineering at University College London (UCL) is one of the leading departments in the UK, with an international reputation for research excellence and impact. Research in the department spans molecular-scale phenomena through to device and process systems engineering, with a strong focus on addressing global challenges in health, sustainability, and advanced technologies.
The Department is seeking a highly motivated PhD student to work on the advanced characterisation of critical materials, using state-of-the-art imaging to understand the internal structure that governs their extraction from primary sources and recovery from end-of-life products. The project sits at the interface of materials characterisation, imaging science, and process engineering, and aims to make extraction and recycling more efficient and less energy-intensive.
The studentship is fully funded for 4 years, starting in October 2026 or later.
Studentship description
Every wind turbine, electric vehicle, and smartphone depends on a small set of metals that are becoming harder to secure. When these technologies reach the end of their life, almost none of those metals are recovered. For some critical materials, such as the rare earth elements at the heart of permanent magnets, less than 1% is recycled; the rest is lost. At the same time, demand is climbing steeply, supply is concentrated in a handful of countries, and primary extraction is energy- and water-intensive. The result is one of the defining resource challenges of the century, and securing these materials sustainably is now a strategic priority for the UK and globally.
Critical materials, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, the rare earth elements, and platinum group metals, underpin the technologies driving the energy transition, from batteries and permanent magnets to electronics and renewable power generation. Whether we can keep supplying them depends not only on mining more, but on extracting and recovering them far more efficiently than we do today. How efficiently these materials can be processed and recovered is ultimately governed by their internal architecture, how different phases are arranged, connected, and bounded across length scales spanning microns to nanometres. Yet they are still characterised largely through two-dimensional sections or bulk averages, which hide the three-dimensional heterogeneity that actually determines processing behaviour. Closing the gap between what we can measure and what controls performance is the central motivation of this project.
This PhD will develop and apply advanced multi-length-scale imaging approaches, centred on X-ray computed tomography and correlative microscopy, to reveal the structure, chemistry, and evolution of critical materials drawn from both primary and secondary (end-of-life) sources. The student will explore how these techniques can move beyond static snapshots towards capturing materials as they respond to processing conditions, and how the resulting data can be turned into quantitative descriptors that guide more efficient and lower-impact extraction and recovery routes. The successful candidate will leverage the department's world-class imaging methods on specific critical materials and will explore advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches to image recognition and reconstruction.
The project is co-supervised by Dr Vassilis Charitopoulos, Associate Professor in Process Systems Engineering (Sargent Centre for Process Systems Engineering), whose work on critical mineral supply and decarbonisation provides the wider systems-level context for the research, connecting what is measured at the microstructural scale to questions of national energy and resource security.
The student will be supervised by Dr Francesco Iacoviello and Dr Vassilis Charitopoulos, with access to UCL's advanced imaging facilities and the potential for beamtime at national synchrotron and large-scale facilities.
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项目资助情况
Funding Notes
Stipend: c. £23,805 per annum + UK fees
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申请要求
Person specification
We welcome applicants from a broad range of backgrounds, including Chemical Engineering, Materials Science, Mechanical Engineering, Physics or Applied Physics, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, and other related interdisciplinary STEM fields. The ideal candidate will be motivated by interdisciplinary research at the interface of materials characterisation, imaging, and process engineering. Prior experience in areas such as X-ray imaging or tomography, electron microscopy, image analysis or programming, materials processing, or mineral and battery systems is welcome but not essential. We seek someone who brings genuine curiosity to open problems and finds purpose in research that matters beyond the lab.
Eligibility
Applicants must hold (or be expected to obtain) a first-class degree at the MEng or MSc level, or an equivalent qualification.
报名方式
招生人信息
Dr FI Iacoviello
邮箱：f.iacoviello@ucl.ac.uk
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