PhD Studentship - vHABIT: Informatics for Vibration Risk and Habitability Resilience in Sustainable Building Design

About the Project

Summary of Award

100% fees covered, and a minimum tax-free annual living allowance of £20,780 (2025/26 UKRI rate).

Project Overview

The vHABIT project develops an informatics-driven framework for monitoring, modelling, and managing floor vibration risk in occupied buildings. As climate adaptation drives the adoption of lightweight, low-carbon structural systems, ensuring these buildings remain habitable under everyday use becomes a critical resilience challenge. Current vibration serviceability criteria are inadequate — based on outdated laboratory studies, disconnected from real occupant experience, and unable to account for the subjective, probabilistic nature of human perception. Through long-term in-service monitoring, standardised subjective evaluation, and the first probability-based design criteria, vHABIT will equip the construction industry to deliver buildings that are simultaneously low-carbon, resilient, and comfortable to occupy.

Start Date

21st September 2026

Duration of Award

3.5 years

Sponsor

NERC

Eligibility Criteria

A 2:1 Honours degree, or international equivalent, in Civil/Structural/Mechanical Engineering.

The vHABIT project requires expertise spanning structural engineering, human perception science, and digital informatics.

• Structural dynamics and vibration engineering - encompassing finite element modelling of floor systems, dynamic testing, modal analysis, signal processing, and familiarity with serviceability standards across steel, concrete, timber, and composite systems. This is an essential competency of the Principal Investigator.
• Sensor technology and monitoring systems - covering accelerometer deployment, IoT sensor network design, edge computing, data acquisition, and management of continuous multi-channel data streams from occupied buildings.
• Human factors and psychophysics - including experimental design for human response studies, questionnaire design and validation, psychometric scaling, and experience with ethical approval for human subjects research.
• Statistics and probabilistic methods - stochastic modelling, reliability theory, Bayesian inference, Monte Carlo simulation, and statistical analysis of subjective data.
• Data science and machine learning - big data analytics, surrogate modelling, digital twin development, and high-performance computing for parametric studies.
• Industry engagement and knowledge transfer is shared across the PI, Co-Investigators, and WSP, ensuring research outputs are translated into practical design guidance and disseminated to standards bodies and the wider profession

Home and international applicants (inc. EU) are welcome to apply and if successful will receive a full studentship. Applicants whose first language is not English require an IELTS score of 6.5 overall with a minimum of 5.5 in all sub-skills.

International applicants may require an ATAS (Academic Technology Approval Scheme) clearance certificate prior to obtaining their visa and to study on this programme.

How to Apply

• You must apply through the University’s Apply to Newcastle Portal
• Once registered select ‘Create a Postgraduate Application’.
• Use ‘Course Search’ to identify your programme of study:
• search for the ‘Course Title’ using the programme code: 8040F
• select ‘PhD Civil Engineering – Civil Engineering (Structural) (full time)' as the programme of study
• You will then need to provide the following information in the ‘Further Details’ section:
• a ‘Personal Statement’ (this is a mandatory field) - upload a document or write a statement directly into the application form
• the studentship code IRISK01 in the ‘Studentship/Partnership Reference’ field
• when prompted for how you are providing your research proposal - select ‘Write Proposal’. You should then type in the title of the research project from this advert. You do not need to upload a research proposal