��������

Ernest Rutherford Fellowships are five year fellowships funded by the STFC (formerly STFC Advanced Fellowships). The 2024 Ernest Rutherford Fellowships will open in June 2025 with the final submission deadline to be 1 October 2025. They will be open to candidates of any nationality, but each institution is limited in the total number of applications it can support, at the ICG we are only able to support 3 proposals. We require candidates to send a statement of interest by 25th June 2025 to be considered for one of these fellowships. The expression of interest template . Please complete the template and send it to icg-recruitment@port.ac.uk. More details about the process can be found on the expression of interest template. We encourage you to contact an ICG staff member, or our Deputy Director of Research (ian.harry@port.ac.uk) if you are interested in applying for an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship with us.

We encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds and those returning to research from career breaks.

For further information see 

Royal Society University Research Fellowships are eight year fellowships open to researchers of all nationalities. The 2025 Royal Society University Research Fellowships will open on 15 July 2025 with a deadline of 10 September 2025.

If you are interested in applying to the 2025 round with ��������:

• You will need to identify an ICG faculty member who will be willing to support you in writing your application (your "sponsor"). Please contact an ICG faculty member in your area of research to ask if they will be willing to support you in this application.
• If submitting an application for the ERF (above), please indicate in the email when sending that off that you are also interested in the URF and name who has agreed to be your sponsor.
• If you are not interested in ERF, but are interested in URF, please contact our Deputy Director for Research (ian.harry@port.ac.uk) before the end of June 2025.

We may need to demand manage if we have a large number of applications.

For full details on the University Research Fellowships scheme please see

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie scheme includes Individual Fellowships intended to add significantly to the development of the best and most-promising researchers active in Europe. These are for trans-national researchers, including researchers coming to Europe and those moving within Europe. There is currently an open call for 2025 Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellows with a deadline to apply of 2025

If you are interested in applying to the 2025 round with ��������:

• You will need to identify an ICG faculty member who will be willing to support you in writing your application (your "sponsor"). Please contact an ICG faculty member in your area of research to ask if they will be willing to support you in this application.
• Once you've identified a sponsor, please contact our Deputy Director for Research (ian.harry@port.ac.uk) before the end of July 2025.

Brexit does not affect the eligibility of UK nationals and/or UK institutes to apply for, or to act as a host for Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions. As the UK has now rejoined the Horizon Europe framework, we will be fully eligible for any future European Commission opportunities, including this one.

For more information on the current round of Individual Fellowships, please see 

For more details on other Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions please see

Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships offer a recognised first step into an independent research career for outstanding scientists and engineers at an early stage of their research career who require a flexible working pattern due to personal circumstances, such as parenting or caring responsibilities or health issues. The next round of Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships will open on 02 September 2025 with a submission date of 28 October 2025. 

If you are interested in applying to the 2025 round with ��������:

• You will need to identify an ICG faculty member who will be willing to support you in writing your application (your "sponsor"). Please contact an ICG faculty member in your area of research to ask if they will be willing to support you in this application.
• Once you've identified a sponsor, please contact our Deputy Director for Research (ian.harry@port.ac.uk) before the end of August 2025.

For further information see

Daphne Jackson Fellowships offer STEM professionals the opportunity to return to a research career after a break of two or more years for a family, health or caring reason. It is the opportunity to balance a personalised retraining programme with a challenging research project, held in a supportive UK university or research establishment. It is possible to apply for a Daphne Jackson Fellowship at any time. If interested in applying, please contact an ICG staff member with a connection to the proposed research.

For more information, please see here

Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellowships and the Norman Lockyer Fellowship provide support for up to 3 years for early career research astronomers and geophysicists. Applications are restricted to candidates who have a recognized PhD (or equivalent) obtained no more than 5 years before the start of their position or who have taken their viva before the application deadline and expect to be awarded the PhD by the time of appointment. These are offered on a 3-year cycle. The Norman Lockyer fellowship will next be available in late 2025, the Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellowships is 2027.

For further information see

Future Leaders Fellowships will grow the strong supply of talented individuals needed to ensure a vibrant environment for research and innovation in the UK. The scheme is open to researchers and innovators from across business, universities, and other organisations.

The 10th Future Leaders Fellowship scheme has now closed. We will update this page when the 11th call to this scheme opens. �������� is able to submit a limited number of Future Leaders Fellowship applications and so an internal selection process is needed to select these from across the University. If you are interested in submitting a Future Leaders Fellowship application with the ICG, please contact one of our faculty as soon as possible who can guide you in the process.

The Royal Society Career Development Fellowships provide the most talented early career scientists from underrepresented groups in STEM with research funding and high-quality training opportunities to build a strong base for a successful research career.

These fellowships open in November with a submission deadline in January. The scheme initially ran "as a pilot with researchers from Black heritage. If successful, the pilot may be broadened to researchers from other underrepresented groups." We await news of the next call for this fellowship. If interested in applying please contact one of our faculty who can help guide your application.

For more information see 

Royal Society Newton International Fellowships are for non-UK scientists who are at an early stage of their research career and wish to conduct research in the UK. This 2025 scheme is now closed, and we await details of the 2026 call (normally with deadline in February - March). If interested in applying, please contact an ICG staff member with a connection to the proposed research.

For further information see
 

Gravitational lensing occurs when light passes close to a massive object (a galaxy or cluster of galaxies): the immense gravitational field deflects the path of the light rays. Strong lensing occurs when the source and the lens are so well aligned that multiple images of the source can form on either side of the lens, potentially highly magnified. This only happens when the alignment is nearly perfect, making strong lens systems rare. The next generation of astronomical surveys are now increasing the sample size from ~1000 to over 100 000. This unprecedented leap forward opens up new windows to constrain cosmology with strong gravitational lensing. 

The observed image separation in a strong lens system depends on the mass of the lens, the distances between observer, lens and source and the theory of gravity. In this project we will exploit the self-similarity of lensing galaxies to investigate how large samples of lenses can be used to simultaneously constrain cosmology, gravity and the density profiles of dark matter in galaxies. You'll be part of the Euclid space telescope team revolutionizing the field of strong lensing.

Depending on your interests, this project will give you the opportunity to work on any or all of: lens searches; lens modelling; stellar dynamics in elliptical galaxies; and hierarchical inference.

Email thomas.collett@port.ac.uk for more details.

Our Universe is expanding and, surprisingly, that expansion is accelerating. One method for probing the expansion history of the Universe is to measure the distance to exploding stars — supernovae. Another method is to use the time variability of a strongly lensed source to constrain cosmological distances. In this project we will explore the unique combination of these probes: What happens if a supernova occurs in a strongly lensed source?

Gravitational lensing occurs when light passes close to a massive object (a galaxy or cluster of galaxies): the immense gravitational field deflects the path of the light rays. Strong lensing occurs when the source and the lens are so well aligned that multiple images of the source can form on either side of the lens, potentially highly magnified. This only happens when the alignment is nearly perfect, making strong lens systems rare. Supernovae are also rare, so discovering strongly lensed supernovae requires astronomical surveys with incredible sensitivity over a large area of sky.

Until recently, strongly lensed supernovae have eluded us. Only three have been confirmed (with a galaxy acting as the lens), but the sample will balloon with the start of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time. You will work with LSST data to discover dozens of lensed SNe a year, follow them up with other telescopes.  You’ll then use this sample of lensed supernovae to make a new measurement of the expansion history of the Universe and constrain the properties of the dark energy that is driving the acceleration of the expansion. 

The project can combine both theoretical and observational aspects or be focused on one, depending on your interests.

Email thomas.collett@port.ac.uk for more details.

Thermonuclear supernovae (SNe) arise from the explosion of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf. The most famous class of stellar explosion are type Ia SNe, whose brightnesses are standardisable to make them excellent probes of cosmology. However, the diversity we observe in the properties of thermonuclear supernovae suggest there are multiple pathways to blowing up a white dwarf. One particularly attractive scenario involves accretion of helium from a companion star into a surface layer of the white dwarf that eventually detonates. This detonation drives a shockwave into the white dwarf, triggering a much larger explosion we see as the supernova itself. This process can cause even low-mass white dwarfs to explode, resulting in so-called faint-and-fast supernovae. Until recently these have been incredibly difficult to discover, with properties unexplained by conventional supernova model.

In this project we will search for these unusual thermonuclear supernovae in real-time to rigorously test and develop new explosion models. We will use data from next-generation transient discovery surveys that �������� has access to such as, LSST, LS4, and GOTO, along with spectroscopic resource from the Time-Domain Extragalactic Survey (TiDES) to characterise their chemical composition and explosion dynamics. Using these data we will be able to both analyse individual supernovae and build up a picture of the population properties, enabling us to understand the astrophysics behind the most unusual thermonuclear explosions in the Universe.

Email chris.frohmaier@port.ac.uk for more details.

This PhD project will investigate the dynamics of collapse and bounce within black holes, exploring whether such phenomena can provide insight into the origins of the universe and the mechanisms driving cosmic acceleration. Traditional black hole models describe a one-way journey to a singularity; however, recent theoretical developments suggest that a collapsing structure within a black hole could experience a bounce, leading to re-expansion. This project will study the physical conditions under which a bounce may occur, employing advanced relativistic models and simulations to examine the role of quantum effects and energy conditions.

By analyzing black hole collapse and bounce scenarios, this work will probe the possibility that our universe’s expansion originated from a similar process—offering a novel perspective on the Big Bang itself. Furthermore, the research will explore whether the dynamics within black holes can mirror the mechanisms behind the observed accelerated expansion of the universe, potentially linking black hole physics to cosmological phenomena on the largest scales. This thesis will build on recent theoretical frameworks and utilize numerical methods to model these processes, contributing to a deeper understanding of both black hole interiors and cosmic evolution.

Email enrique.gaztanaga@port.ac.uk for more details

Understanding the origin of the dark energy responsible for the accelerated expansion of the Universe is the biggest open problem in cosmology. Recent results from the DESI survey suggest that dark energy may not be a cosmological constant but even evolve with time, an even more puzzling scenario. DESI and the space telescope mission Euclid, both examples of the latest “Stage-IV” galaxy surveys, are currently mapping out tens of millions of galaxy redshifts in order to better measure the properties of dark energy. A key way to achieve this is by analysing the clustering of galaxies in these maps to determine distances and the growth of cosmic structure. This project will explore galaxy clustering techniques applied to these vast datasets to constrain the expansion history of the Universe over the last 11 billion years and pin down the dark energy equation of state. You will be a part of two major international survey collaborations, producing the most important cosmology results of this decade. Depending on your preferences and skills, the focus of this project can cover all aspects of the missions, ranging from hands-on analysis of telescope data all the way through to cosmological inference, or to planning the next generation of spectroscopic surveys after DESI and Euclid. 

Email seshadri.nadathur@port.ac.uk for more details.

In the last decade the ground-based gravitational-wave detector LIGO has gone through a series of hardware upgrades to improve its sensitivity. As such in every subsequent observing run the number of gravitational waves detected from compact binary mergers, in particular stellar mass binary black hole mergers, has sharply increased. In the next observing run (O5) which will start halfway through this PhD, we expect to observe gravitational waves every day.

One half of this project will focus on ways in which we can improve the estimation of gravitational-wave parameters by developing novel software techniques to overcome the detector noise which can bias results. We will also analyse the exciting new O5 data as it is coming in. There is also an opportunity for an extended stay at one of the LIGO observatories.

Building on from this work we will look to the future LISA space mission, due for launch in the mid 2030s. Detector noise and gaps within the data from this instrument will be a stumbling block for our current methods to characterise a supermassive black hole merger. We will develop new ways to overcome these issues to ensure we can accurately find and understand the nature of black holes that LISA is sensitive to.

Email laura.nuttall@port.ac.uk for more details.