Our Industry Community

The cost to fully-fund a project is £12.5k per year for 4 years, which includes rights to IP. The remaining funding, at no extra cost to your organisation, will come from the EPSRC.

In-kind contributions can vary depending on the nature of the project, but we would expect a minimum allocation of up to 2 hours of supervision time per month. Additional in-kind support can include providing access to equipment, facilities, data, training, etc. from your organisation, or hosting the student at your site for a period of up to 3 months.

We welcome additional contributions to the centre and suggest using the ‘Express your interest’ form and we can then set up an introductory chat. You can also come along to any of our events and directly engage with the leadership team, our students, and other members and associates of the centre.

By supporting a student, you can get up to 4 years of dedicated research time on one of your challenge areas, and/or test ‘blue skies’ ideas that you might not otherwise have the means of exploring. Additionally, you can inform, shape, and advise the research and training agenda within the centre, while gaining access to the skills of the various team members. You can also use the CDT to upskill an employee within your organisation.

Use the expression of interest form to make initial contact, and from there, we can pair you with an appropriate academic supervisory team to maximise synergies with your organisation. This academic team can then help to brainstorm and draft a suitable project within the scope of a typical PhD, while ensuring your innovation needs and values are met. Many of our current partners fully defined their research goals themselves; we can be entirely flexible.

There is no need for your organisation to be based within the UK. We already work with several multinational and international organisations.

The PhD research will be conducted during the first 3 years, where the 4th and final year will be predominately for writing up the results into a thesis and engaging with outward-looking training to set up the students for their future careers. If you support a smaller undergraduate research project, we expect that projects would last 2–3 months from around February to May each year.

Yes, we welcome upskilling of industry-sponsored staff through the PINZ CDT programme.

All background IP brought to a project would remain in ownership of the respective parties. Any IP generated during a fully-funded project would be assigned to the industry partner. For in-kind support, generated IP would remain in possession of the student or company providing the funding.

During the lifetime of the centre, we expect around >40 PhD projects to be based at Newcastle University and >10 projects of be based at the University of York. Projects that align more towards chemical engineering would likely involve academic supervision at Newcastle, while projects aligning with chemistry would involve academic supervision based at York. Where necessary, projects could also be jointly run across both institutions.

Students will be available for employment on submission of their PhD thesis and successful viva, which due to the nature of research and flexible work, could take place at any time throughout the year. We expect to graduate a minimum of 10 PhD students from the centre each year between 2028–2033, most commonly during the summer.