King's College London

Course introduction

Our internationally renowned department fosters an innovative and supportive research environment. We welcome PhD students from around the world working on a broad range of topics.

This PhD sits within the Statistics Group at King’s, a rapidly growing area of research in the Department in response to the increasing importance of data-driven methods across science, engineering, and society. The group has research strengths in the design and analysis of experiments, Bayesian and computational and nonparametric statistics, time series, functional and high-dimensional data analysis, extreme value theory, and modern Monte Carlo methods including Markov chain Monte Carlo and sequential Monte Carlo.

We offer a wide range of research opportunities in these research areas with strong links to applications in healthcare, engineering, finance, and the natural sciences. The group is highly collaborative, working across King’s and with external academic and industry partners to develop new methodological and applied statistical approaches.

You can explore and identify research topics and academic staff in your area of interest.

Recent research projects

The Statistics Group at King’s is active in collaborative research aligned with its core methodological strengths, with the examples below giving a brief snapshot of recent activity.

Extreme events and complex systems: Development of statistical methods for modelling rare but high-impact events, with applications to critical infrastructure and risk.

Health and biomedical applications: PhD research on Parkinson’s disease, recognised by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) Emerging Applications Section PhD Thesis prize, highlighting methodological development motivated by real-world healthcare challenges.

Interdisciplinary data science: Collaborative work through the Alan Turing Institute involving members of the group, applying statistical methodology to assess the effectiveness of AI predictive systems.

These examples reflect the group’s broader strengths in statistical methodology and its application across science, engineering, and health.

What you will gain

• Strong research environment and central London location: 100% of our research was rated world-leading or internationally excellent in REF 2021 and our location on the Strand Campus means you have easy access to other internationally leading groups at KCL and the wider London academic community.
• Methods that have impact in real applications: your project can have real relevance to sectors such as pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and finance.
• Cross-disciplinary links, particularly with the Healthcare faculties: regular meetings provide forums for discussion and collaboration across the KCL Statistics community.
• Funded conference and training provision: structured training is provided via routes such as the London Taught Course Centre and individual funding allows tailored conference and workshop attendance.

Who is this programme for?

The programme is for mathematically strong graduates who want to develop new statistical methodology and apply it to real-world problems. It suits those with a background in statistics, mathematics or closely related fields who are ready to work independently on an extended research project, drawing on close supervision and an active research community.