Available Joint PhD projects

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 …

This joint PhD project will be 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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

This joint PhD project will be 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 …

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. …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

This joint PhD project will be 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 …

This joint PhD project will be 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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

This joint PhD project will be based at The University of Melbourne with a minimum 12 month stay at KU Leuven Please note: this position has been filled and will no longer accept applications. 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 …

This joint PhD project will be 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 …

This joint PhD project will be 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 …

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 …

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. …