In 2020 The University of Melbourne (UoM) and KU Leuven established an international research training group (IRTG) to support research collaboration and the development of globally-engaged researchers.
This international team of project supervisors developed graduate research projects for jointly awarded PhDs with the aim to train young researchers who will gain international research experience. PhD candidates engaged in the project will be enrolled at both institutions. The research work will be performed under joint supervision and will be judged according to academic standards of both institutions. At the end of the program, each PhD candidate will be eligible to receive a PhD, recognized by two testamurs, one from UoM and one from KU Leuven, stating the joint nature of the award and name of the partner institution.
The international team consists of 12 separate pairs of Principal Investigators who will establish the first cohort of 24 graduate researchers who will be able to access support funding which includes tuition fee waivers, a full living allowance, health insurance and relocation support.
Successful candidates will:
- gain complementary skills from international colleagues to increase the impact of their research;
- grow their international networks and develop a truly global perspective;
- become part of two high-quality research environments and cultures.
How to apply
If you are interested in this opportunity, find out more about what joint PhD projects are currently available and then read the application guidelines before contacting the lead supervisor.
KU Leuven-Melbourne Joint PhD program in the news:
30 joint PhDs from KU Leuven and University of Melbourne
Date: 06 Aug 2020
KU Leuven and the University of Melbourne are teaming up to offer 30 joint PhDs to students as part of their ‘priority partnership’. Read more
KU Leuven and Melbourne to offer thirty joint PhDs
Date: 14 Jul 2020
Peter Lievens, Vice Rector for International Policy at KU Leuven: ‘In this phase, Leuven and Melbourne will fund thirty joint PhDs, spread over three consecutive calls. That is a significant number, especially with a top-level institution such as the University of Melbourne: it is the highest-ranked university in Australia and has a rock-solid reputation worldwide.’ Their trip included negotiations with the University of Melbourne about stepping up research collaboration. The result: the two institutions will fund thirty joint doctoral projects together. Read more
Date: 08 Jul 2020
A couple of months ago, when corona was still mostly known as a brand of beer, Rector Luc Sels and Vice Rector Peter Lievens travelled to Australia with a KU Leuven delegation. Read more
Date: 19 Jun 2019
Centre for Eye Research Australia researchers Associate Professor Peter van Wijngaarden and Dr Xavier Hadoux discuss their research to develop a simple eye test that will help identify people at risk of Alzheimer’s disease, opening the way to treatments and potentially a cure. The video is available on Youtube.
Upcoming KU Leuven-Melbourne Joint PhD research projects are advertised below. Please read the application guidelines before contacting the supervisors.
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How to apply
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST Applicants for KU Leuven-Melbourne Joint PhD projects should: Identify a project of interest Register their interest with the project supervisor based at the University of Melbourne, including the following information: Name, contact details Joint PhD project of interest Cover Letter, CV and Transcript Any supporting documentation Note: All applicants are required to meet the entry requirements for a PhD …
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Subcellular Ca2+ signalling microdomains regulating cardiomyocyte growth and function
This joint PhD project will be based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Project description Precise control of intracellular Ca2+ levels is essential for heart function. Not only do increases in intracellular Ca2+ induce contraction of cardiomyocytes underlying the pumping of the heart, they participate in the regulation of gene expression that mediates long …
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LTCC‐based liquid metal tunable high‐Q notch filters for the emerging 5G communication systems
This joint PhD project will be based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven Project title: Versatile usage of liquid metals in emerging microwave technologies Project description The current approaches for implementation of tunable high‐Q notch filters fail to concurrently address the compact size, high‐Q and strong attenuation, and frequency tunability challenges. Research objectives The research objectives are …
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Self‐healing flexible biosensors for microwave dielectric spectroscopy
This joint PhD project will be based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Project title: Versatile usage of liquid metals in emerging microwave technologies Project description Over the past decades, flexible materials featuring characteristics such as miniaturization, outstanding mechanical flexibility (soft and deformable), excellent loss tangent, stable and desirable electrical properties over wide frequency bandwidths, …
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Soil-structure interaction framework for plate anchors in sand under cyclic loading
This joint PhD project will be based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven Project description The emergence of offshore floating renewable energy devices requires economic anchoring solutions. Plate anchors could represent such a solution due to their high efficiency in resisting tensile uplift loading. While the monotonic capacity of plate anchors embedded in sands …
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Soil-structure interaction framework for monopiles in sand under cyclic loading
This joint PhD project will be based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Project description Recent developments in offshore renewable energy sector have resulted in bigger wind turbines and thus an increase in the mostly commonly used monopile foundation’s diameter to guarantee their performance especially under higher lateral cyclic loads due to waves and …
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The actuarial valuation of insurable risks in a changing risk landscape
This joint PhD project will be based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Project title: VALERIA: Valuation and Advanced Learning methods for Emerging, global Risks In Actuarial science Project description The insurance industry faces fundamental changes that will not be tackled by incremental improvements of existing techniques, but call for entirely new insurance pricing paradigms. …
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EPiC Europe: a construction material environmental flow database for Europe
This joint PhD project will be based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven Project description Our buildings and cities are responsible for a significant proportion of global environmental issues, including greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion, waste and pollution. Efforts to address these issues have predominately focused on operational performance such as improving the energy …
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Environmental benchmarks for residential buildings in Belgium based on a hybrid LCI and modelling approach
This joint PhD project will be based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Project description Buildings and cities contribute significantly to global environmental issues, including greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion, waste and pollution. Life cycle assessment (LCA) enables assessment and optimization of the environmental impact of buildings over their entire life cycle. In Belgium, …
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The eye as a window to the brain: tackling neurodegenerative disorders
This joint PhD project will be based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven Project description A major clinical challenge in dementia care is the accurate and timely detection of the disease. Reliance on clinical features alone is problematic due to the overlap between dementia syndromes. Furthermore, existing tests, such as cerebrospinal fluid analysis and …
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The eye as a window to the brain: tackling neurodegenerative disorders
This joint PhD project will be based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Project description Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia, affecting 43,8 million people in 2016 and an estimated 130 million by 2050. The pathological changes of AD in the brain occur gradually over 20-30 years before the onset of …
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Critical phenomena in complex and real spectra
This joint PhD project will be based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven Project description Non-Hermitan linear operators describe a multitude of systems like open scattering systems in physics or the signal transmission in wireless telecommunications. Such operators can be characterised either by their eigenvalues or their singular values. The long-standing problem of their …
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Critical phenomena in complex and real spectra
This joint PhD project will be based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Project description Non-Hermitian matrices have their eigenvalues in the complex plane. For random non-Hermitian matrices the typical behavior is that the complex eigenvalues behave like mutually repelling charged particles like electrons in a trap that accumulate on a region in the …
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Stem cell therapy for the treatment of achalasia and gastroparesis
This joint PhD project will be based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven Project title: Stem cell therapy for the treatment of gastrointestinal motility disorders: targeting defects in neuronal wiring Project description Gastroparesis and achalasia are debilitating gastrointestinal disorders caused by the selective loss of nitrergic neurons (which contain neuronal nitric oxide synthase, nNOS) from …
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Defects in long-distance neuronal wiring in the large intestine and in Hirschsprung’s Disease
This joint PhD project will be based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Project title: Stem cell therapy for the treatment of gastrointestinal motility disorders: targeting defects in neuronal wiring Project description The gastrointestinal (GI) tract is a complex organ that plays essential roles in the propulsion of food and waste products, nutrient and energy …
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Trustworthy and insightful algorithms for industrial decision making
This joint PhD project will be based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Project description Some of the most critical decision-making challenges in industry take the form of mathematical optimisation problems, which seek to efficiently determine optimal decisions from a huge number of choices. Often these problems have difficult and conflicting constraints that make …
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Turning the smart city vision into a reality using Digital Twin and Geospatial modelling: dissecting UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11
This joint PhD project will be based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven. Project title: Governance modelling for sustainable geospatial information management using emerging technologies Project description A smart city is a conceptual global framework. The vision of a smart city is a blend of many associated processes (built environment and natural) in space …
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Governance modelling of geospatial information management
This joint PhD project will be based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Project title: Governance modelling for sustainable geospatial information management using emerging technologies Project description The need for governing the management of geospatial information (in terms of roles, responsibilities, structures) is widely recognised as problematic at different administrative levels around the world. …
Current KU Leuven-Melbourne research projects scheduled to commence in 2021 and 2022 are listed below.
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Subcellular Ca2+ signalling microdomains regulating cardiomyocyte growth and function
This joint PhD project is based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven Project description Intracellular Ca2+ plays a central role in controlling heart function. Increases in intracellular Ca2+ trigger the contraction of cardiomyocytes underlying the pumping action of the heart. Ca2+ signals also regulate metabolism, and have been shown to contribute to regulation of …
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Combined actuarial and financial valuation of hybrid insurance liabilities
This joint PhD project is based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven Project title: VALERIA: Valuation and Advanced Learning methods for Emerging, global Risks In Actuarial science Project description The 21st century faces emerging risks, such as climate change and cyber risk, as well as new versions of long-standing risks, such as longevity and pandemics, …
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Advanced cell models and multifunctional nanomaterials for light-mediated cancer therapies
This joint PhD project is based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven Project description Despite significant advances in cancer therapy over the past decades, cancer remains the number one cause of death worldwide. In the last years there has been increasing interest in the development of new treatment modalities with reduced side effects for …
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Advanced cell models and multifunctional nanomaterials for light-mediated cancer therapies
This joint PhD project is based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Project description Despite significant advances in cancer therapy over the past decades, cancer remains the number one cause of death worldwide. In the last years there has been increasing interest in the development of new treatment modalities with reduced side effects for …
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Trustworthy and insightful algorithms for industrial decision making
Project description Some of the most critical decision-making challenges in industry take the form of mathematical optimisation problems, which seek to efficiently determine optimal decisions from a huge number of choices. Often these problems have difficult and conflicting constraints that make even finding an acceptable solution challenging, let alone a provably optimal one. Complicating matters further, there are often several conflicting …
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“Language is (not) a barrier”: Towards effective translation policies and practices for official communication with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities in Brussels
This joint PhD project is based at KU Leuven with a minimum 12 month stay at The University of Melbourne. Metropolises like Brussels or Melbourne are sites of unprecedented cultural and linguistic diversity. This creates pressing challenges for multilingual official communication with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities, as seen in the Covid-19 pandemic. Addressing those challenges will require change in …
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“Language is (not) a barrier”: Towards effective translation policies and practices for official communication with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities in Melbourne
This joint PhD project is based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven Metropolises like Brussels or Melbourne are sites of unprecedented cultural and linguistic diversity. This creates pressing challenges for multilingual official communication with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities, as seen in the Covid-19 pandemic. Addressing those challenges will require change in …
Professor Stan Skafidas
Stan Skafidas the academic lead of the KU Leuven-Melbourne joint PhD program. He is a Professor of Nanoelectronics in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and IT and the UOM project lead on Versatile usage of liquid metals in emerging microwave technologies. He collaborates with Professor Dr Dominique Schreurs on their KU Leuven project. Dominique Schreurs is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at KU Leuven.
Dr Shiao Huey Chow
Shiao Huey Chow is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Infrastructure Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and IT (UOM), an experimentalist in geotechnical engineering with research interests in offshore geotechnics and the UOM project lead on Cyclic soil-structure interaction framework for the foundations of offshore renewable energy structures. She also collaborates with Assistant Professor Dr George Anoyatis on their KU Leuven based project. George Anoyatis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at KU Leuven.
Associate Professor Robert Crawford
Robert Crawford is an Associate Professor in Construction & Environmental Assessment Architecture in the Faculty of Building and Planning and the UOM project lead on Data and tools for improving the environmental performance of buildings and cities. He also collaborates with Associate Professor Dr Karen Allacker on their KU Leuven based project. Karen Allacker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at KU Leuven.
Dr James Hutchison
James Hutchison is an ARC Future Fellow in the Faculty of Science and manages all KU Leuven interactions on behalf of Paul Mulvaney on the UOM project Advanced cell models and multifunctional nanomaterials for light-mediated cancer therapies and the KU Leuven project.
Dr Mario Kieburg
Mario Kieburg is a Lecturer in Random Matrix Theory in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the Faculty of Sciene and UOM project lead on Critical phenomena in complex and real spectra. He also collaborates with Professor Dr Arno Kuijlaars on their KU Leuven based project. Arno Kuijlaars is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at KU Leuven.
Professor Anthony Pym
Anthony Pym Professor of Translation Studies in the Faculty of Arts and UOM project lead on Language is (not) a barrier”: Towards effective translation policies and practices for official communication with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities in linguistically superdiverse cities. He also collaborates with Professor Dr Reine Meylaerts on their KU Leuven based project. Reine Meylaerts is a Professor in Translation and Intercultural Transfer in the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven.
Professor Paul Mulvaney
Paul Mulvaney is a Laureate Professor of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry in the Faculty of Science and Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science. He is the UOM project lead on Advanced cell models and multifunctional nanomaterials for light-mediated cancer therapies and collaborates with Assistant Professor Dr Susana Rocha on their KU Leuven project. Susana Rocha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at KU Leuven.
Professor Abbas Rajabifard
Abbas Rajabifard is Discipline Leader of Geomatics, Director of Smart Sustainable Development and Leader of the Future Infrastructure Research Program at the Faculty of Engineering and IT. He is also Director of the Centre for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Land Administration (CSDILA) and UOM project lead on Governance modelling for sustainable geospatial information management using emerging technologies. He collaborates with Professor dr ir Joep Crompvoets on their KU Leuven project. Joep Crompvoets is Professor of Information management in the Public Sector and senior researcher in the Public Governance Group at KU Leuven.
Dr Vijay Rajagopal
Vijay Rajagopal is a Senior Lecturer, Computational Cellular Biomechanics in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and IT and the UOM project lead on Subcellular Ca2+ signalling microdomains regulating cardiomyocyte growth and function. He also collaborates with Professor Dr H. Llewelyn Roderick on their KU Leuven project. H. Llewelyn Roderick is a Professor in the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences at KU Leuven.
Professor Kate Smith-Miles
Kate Smith-Miles is a Professor of Applied Mathematics in the School of Mathematics and the UOM project lead on Trustworthy and insightful algorithms for industrial decision making. She also collaborates with Dr Tony Wauters on their KU Leuven project. Tony Wauters is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven.
Dr Lincon Stamp
Lincon Stamp is a NHMRC Research Officer in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences and UOM project lead on Stem cell therapy for the treatment of gastrointestinal motility disorders: targeting defects in neuronal wiring. He also collaborates with Professor Dr Pieter Vanden Berghe on their KU Leuven based project. Pieter Vanden Berghe is a Professor in the Department of Chronic Diseases and Metabolism at KU Leuven.
Associate Professor Peter van Wijngaarden
Peter van Wijngaarden is an Associate Professor in Surgery (Ophthalmology) at the Ophthalmology Eye and Ear Hospital and the UOM project lead on The eye as a window to the brain: tackling neurodegenerative disorders. He also collaborates with Professor Ingeborg Stalmans on their KU Leuven based project. Ingeborg Stalmans is head of the Research Group Ophthalmology and a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at KU Leuven.
Dr Rui Zhou
Dr Rui Zhou is a Senior Lecturer in Actuarial Studies in the Faculty of Business and Economics and the UOM project lead on VALERIA: Valuation and Advanced Learning methods for Emerging, global Risks In Actuarial science. She also collaborates with Professor Dr Katrien Antonio on their KU Leuven based project. Katrien Antonio is a Professor in the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven.
The IRTG Coordinator team consists of:
- Petra Van Nieuwenhoven
The team works with the Joint PhD program Academic Lead on operational activities, including recruitment and the end to end graduate research lifecycle processes for joint PhD candidates. Please direct all enquiries to jointphd-admin@unimelb.edu.au.