Sensors are everywhere—in phones, hospitals, factories, and environmental monitors—but the UK is running short of the people who truly understand how they work and how to build better ones. Traditional PhDs train individuals in narrow, single-discipline topics, but sensor innovation often falls in the gaps between physics, engineering, computer science, and user-needs. Industry complains that graduates treat sensors as "black boxes" without grasping the underlying principles, and that the skills needed to capitalise on rapid technological advances are waning. This Centre for Doctoral Training tackles that head-on. The CDT will train cohorts of PhD students together, not as isolated researchers. In their first year, they will attend shared lectures and practicals on sensor hardware, data interpretation, and user requirements, then tackle a team-based industrial problem. In years two to four, each student picks a PhD topic co-supervised by academics from at least two different departments, with industrial mentors throughout. The programme draws on more than 70 principal investigators across the University, building on a previous network that already broke down discipline barriers. If successful, the CDT will produce a generation of sensor researchers who can bridge disciplines, understand the full chain from physical principle to application, and meet industry’s demand for skilled innovators—keeping UK manufacturing, healthcare, and environmental monitoring competitive.
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Analysis and diagnosis, the core elements of sensing, are highlighted by almost every initiative for health, environment, security and quality of life. Sensors have advanced to an extent that they are sought for many applications in manufacturing and detection segments, and their cost advantages have boosted their utility and demand. The pillars of sensor research are in highly diverse fields and traditional single-discipline research is particularly poor at catalysing sensor innovation and application, as these typically fall in the 'discipline gaps'. Furthermore, the underpinning technology is advancing at a phenomenal pace. These developments are creating exciting opportunities, but also enormous challenges to UK academia and industry: Traditional PhD programmes are centred on individuals and focused on narrowly defined problems and do not produce the skills and leadership qualities required to capitalise on future opportunities. Industry complains that skills are waning and sensors are increasingly being treated as 'black boxes' without an understanding of underlying principles. We propose to establish the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Sensor Technologies and Measurement to address these problems head on. The CDT will provide a co-ordinated programme of training in research-, team-, and leadership-skills to future generations of sensor champions. The CDT will build on the highly successful CamBridgeSens research network which was previously funded by the EPSRC under its discipline-bridging programme and which has transformed the culture in which sensor research is being carried out at our University, breaking down discipline barriers, and bringing together world-leading expertise, infrastructure and people from more than 20 Departments. The CDT will now extend this culture to the training of future sensor researchers to generate a virtual super department in Cambridge with more than 70 PIs. The programme will be underpinned by a consortium of industrial partners which is strongly integrated into the CDT and through its needs and engagement will inform the direction of the programme. In the first year of their 4 year PhD programme, student cohorts will attend specialised lectures, practicals and research mini-projects, to receive training in a range of topics underpinning sensor research, including physical principles of sensor hardware, acquisition and interpretation of sensory information, and user requirements of sensor applications. Team-building aspects will be strongly emphasised, and through an extended sensor project treated as a team challenge in the first year of their programme, the students will together, as a cohort, face a problem of industrial relevance and learn how to address a research problem as a team rather than individually. The cohorts will be supported by a mix of academic and industrial mentors, and will receive business, presentation and project-management skills. During years 2 to 4 of their PhD course, students will pick a PhD topic offered by the more than 70 PIs participating in the programme. Each topic on offer will be supervised by at least two academics from different departments/disciplines and may include industrial partners in the CDT. Throughout, we will create strong identities for the sensor student cohorts through a number of people-based activities that maximise engagement between researchers, research activities and that bridge gaps across disciplines, Departments and research cultures.
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