PhD Students

[Please follow the instructions at the bottom to ensure I respond to your email]

TL:DR: This page contains some general guidelines to apply for a PhD, and a few instructions to apply with me. Look at the application process and funding for information on available scholarships.

It is not always clear how to prepare a good PhD application package, so I have collected some guidelines about what I think makes a good one:

• Demonstrate we would be a good match in terms of research interests and technical experience.
• Provide a research statement that you think would be a good match for both of us, and that demonstrates your abilities for critical thinking.
• Provide references from relevant people who have worked closely with you, especially if they have experience in directing or doing a PhD.

It is often useful (but not necessary) to contact me in advance of applying. Preparing high-quality materials for a PhD application takes substantial time, and an early contact gives us a chance to figure out if we would be a good match before going through the official PhD application process. I will often have funding for specific topics, but excellent applicants will be less constrained in topics by leveraging college and departmental scholarships.

Research Topics, Qualifications and Experience

I am looking for candidates with interest and hands-on experience in building computer systems, covering either software, hardware or a combination of both. The ideal candidates will also have some background on other topics, such as (but not limited to) computer security and privacy, formal methods, high performance computing, distributed systems, virtualization, or resource management. You can check my research interests and list of publications to get a clearer idea of both my present and past research areas.

Your application should highlight information such as:

• Markers of academic excellence. These include things such as prizes, awards, official recognitions for sustained high academic marks, placements on other academic institutions or research labs, etc.

• Markers of technical and research competence. These should include complex projects where you have participated in, and that spanned one or more months. They can be of any nature (papers, presentations, software, etc.) and domain (class projects, internships, hobbies, etc.), as long as they are relevant to the field of study you want to pursue and show your technical or research ability. You should always clearly identify your role in the conception and implementation of such projects.

You should include this information when you first contact me, as well as in a later formal application for a PhD. Together, these will help define if we are a good match to work together, and can dramatically increase your chances of getting a funded position.

Personal Statement

Your personal statement should clearly show that you are considering doing a PhD seriously; it is an opportunity for you to show you are an excellent candidate, and aid the admission committee in evaluating your aptitude and motivation for a PhD. The personal statement should include aspects such as:

• The topic of your research, and the reasons for choosing it.
• Why you would like to do a PhD with me.
• Your strengths in terms of competence for such topic. This should highlight things such as markers of academic excellence, and markers of technical and research competence that are related to the selected topic.
• How your choice of research topic fits with your future career plans.

Research Statement

Your research statement is a key part of your PhD application materials. It is meant to show you have the ability to conduct guided research and independent critical thinking. Your PhD will not be necessarily tied to doing the work you describe in your research statement, but the selected topic should credibly fall within our shared research interests.

An excellent research statement will be around 4 pages long (without counting the title and bibliography pages), and will showcase your ability to acquire knowledge and think critically by doing the following steps:

• Identify an open problem, or set of interrelated problems, within an area of research.
• Describe how recent work has weaknesses or unsolved questions in addressing such problem(s).
• Extract a general question (your PhD hypothesis) that, if answered, would go in the right direction to solve such problem(s).
• Provide a reasonably concrete 3-4 year plan to investigate this hypothesis (it is OK to be a lot more speculative when planning past the first year).

The open problem should fall somewhere within my research interests, and be informed by the state of the art on the selected topic. To identify a problem and draft a research question, it is often useful to pick between 2 and 6 papers that are closely related; this can be a mix of papers from relevant conferences on the last few years (ASPLOS, EuroSys, HPCA, ISCA, MICRO, OSDI, SOSP), and some of my past publications.

References

If you are a student at Imperial, I suggest that you apply for an undergrad or MSc project with me, so we get to know each other before embarking together on a PhD. In cases where that is not possible, you will have to provide two reference letters from people you have worked with. Each should talk about your professional relationship, your strengths and weaknesses, and contain a concluding recommendation. Please have your referees send their letters directly to the PhD application system, indicating their names and professional positions in your application.

Application Process and Funding

Last but not least, please carefully read all the information on the College application process, as well as the specific deadlines and guidelines for the department of computing.

When applying, set the following fields:

• Academic programme: Computing Research (PhD)
• Proposed research supervisor: Lluis Vilanova
• Proposed research group: LSDS
• Research areas (any combination will direct your application to me): Systems / Security / Computer architecture / Operating systems

The department has various PhD scholarships, which cover college fees and a bursary for living expenses: 1, 2, 3.

In addition, I also have funding for scholarships on specific areas, including but not limited to:

• Future Secure Cloud
• Hardware and OS Support for Future Smart Data Center Disaggregation
• Hardware and Software Co-Design for Security and Virtualization Performance

Instructions to apply

If interested, please send me an email with the following information, so we can have a chat about our mutual interests for a PhD:

• Email subject (exact phrasing):
  Application for PhD position
• Email contents:
  1. A brief summary of your research topics of interest, qualifications, and technical and research competence.
  2. A list of 2 or 3 papers from my list of publications, each of them accompanied by a brief description of the problem it solves and how, followed by a brief description of why you find that paper interesting from a research perspective. It is also OK if I am not the author on some of the papers you describe (see the list of relevant conferences above).
  3. A copy of your personal statement.
  4. A copy of your research statement, if you have one.
  5. A copy of your CV, highlighting any information related to the core points in your personal statement.
  6. A copy of your degree transcripts.
  7. Any other information you might consider relevant.

NOTE: Requests without the subject above will be ignored by my mail filters, and I might not get to see them on time