It's great that you're considering a PhD! This is a very exciting time for artificial intelligence and robotics. Graduating with a PhD from my lab will open up a great number of opportunities for you, including research scientist positions in the top tech firms, academic positions towards one day setting up your own research group, and startup ideas for those with entrepreneurial ambitions. As a PhD student in my lab, you will be conducting exciting and ambitious research in a supportive and friendly environment, with state-of-the-art facilities (robots and compute) and regular interaction with me and the rest of my group, and you will have the opportunity to travel internationally to the top conferences and events across the world.
 

How to apply

Before making an official application, please complete the form linked to at the bottom of the page (in the "Contacting me" section), so that I can let you know if making a full application would be appropriate. After this, if I invite you to make an official application, this should be done through the Department of Computing's online application system. In your application, for the "Academic Programme" field, you should select "Computing Research PhD" (do not select "AI and Machine Learning PhD 4YFT"). In the "Proposed research supervisor" field, you should enter "Edward Johns", and in the "Proposed research group" field, you should enter "The Robot Learning Lab". In the "Proposed research topic field", you should enter a title of your choice, based on your research proposal.

This year, I am also recruiting PhD students specifically for a project on dexterous robot learning, which you can read about here. There is a separate form to complete for that project. If you are interested in both "regular" PhD applications, and PhD applications for the dexterous robot learning project, please complete both of the forms.


Application criteria

Officially, the minimum requirement for applicants is a Master's degree with a grade equivalent to a UK distinction. However, please be aware that applications to my lab are highly competitive. Therefore, to be invited to an interview, you would need to have outstanding grades, and you would need to show knowledge and interest in robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, beyond just the content of your degree's taught modules. For example, this could be demonstrated by any publications you may have, through any personal projects you have done outside of your degree, or by writing an intriguing and logical research proposal.


Application timeline

I am currently accepting PhD applications for entry in October 2025. Most new PhD students start in my lab in October, but other starting dates may also be possible. Formally, there are four application deadlines: 15th October 2024, 15th December 2024, 15th February 2025, and 15th April 2025. After each deadline, applications will be assessed, and promising candidates may then be invited to interviews. Applications may stay in the system for several weeks or months after the deadline, and may be combined with applications from the next deadline, before any interviews are conducted.


Funding

If we decide to make you an offer after your interviews, then this will be conditional on you securing funding for your PhD. This funding would pay for tuition fees, and also your personal living costs. Some students secure their own funding, such as by self-funding, or through a scholarship provided by their home country. To determine whether or not you would be able to self-fund your PhD, you can read our information on tuition fees and living costs. PhDs at Imperial College usually last for 4 years, so self-funded students would need to pay tuition fees for 3 years and living costs for 4 years (PhD students are not charged tuition fees for their final year).
 
If you require a funded position, then after we have made you a conditional offer, your application would then be passed to the department's funding committee for further assessment. There are a number of scholarships provided by College, which cover both tuition fees and living costs for the duration of your PhD. The PhD funding committee will assess all candidates who have reached this stage of the assessment, and award funding to the top-ranked candidates. The type of scholarship available to you depends on whether you qualify as a Home student or an Overseas student for tuition fees. You are a Home student if you are a UK National or you have settled / pre-settled status. Otherwise, you are an Overseas student. You can read more about your fee status here.

As well as these College scholarships, there are also a number of external scholarships, which you may be eligible for depending on your nationality. Some examples of these external scholarships can be found here. However, there are other scholarships not listed here, and you should make your own enquires at home based on your nationality. If you have already been awarded an external scholarship, or if you are able to self-fund your PhD through other sources, then you should indicate this on your PhD application form.


Research proposal

Your application should include a research proposal for your PhD. This will be used as part of our assessment of your application, and will also form the basis of discussions should you be invited for an interview. However, if you were to receive an offer, your actual PhD may vary from this proposal, based on my guidance, your interests, and recent developments elsewhere. So, rather than being a precise plan for your PhD, the proposal is your chance to showcase your curiosity and creativity, and your ability to explain your ideas clearly. Your proposal will be assessed primarily by me, so please write it with a specialist audience in mind. You are free to decide the length and format of your proposal, but I recommend being concise and writing no more than four pages. Please do not write a substantial literature review as part of this proposal; just get straight to the point. Please use figures to help illustrate your ideas.
 
Research in my lab focusses primarily on robot manipulation, so your proposal should broadly be on this topic. In particular, we are interested in real-world robot learning: our robots learn with real image observations (rather than assuming access to low-dimensional states), and we aim to learn everyday tasks in real-world environments (rather than toy tasks in simulated or artificial setups).

I am particularly keen to read research proposals on the following two topics: (1) efficient imitation learning from a small number of human demonstrations, or (2) reinforcement learning and sim-to-real for dexterous, multi-fingered manipulation. Note that, although in my lab we do sometimes work with LLMs/VLMs, writing a research proposal which primarily studies how to use LLMs/VLMs to control robots, is unlikely to stand out and get you an interview. I would be much more interested to read a proposal which studies how robots can learn tasks which are more complex, and require more dexterity, than those that LLMs/VLMs can solve.

For further ideas, you may also wish to read up on publications from the lab here. It is important that your proposal shows how your proposed research is related to one or more of the publications from my lab. Of course, you are not expected to be an expert in the field yet, but you should show that you have sufficient motivation to read around the subject and learn about the state-of-the-art, and sufficient understanding to identify limitations of existing methods and to propose potential solutions.

An example of a good proposal would be one which has a clear and focussed research hypothesis (what question(s) do you want to answer?) and a clear procedure for evaluating that hypothesis (how are you going to answer the question(s)?). Try to be as specific as you can about what you want to implement and what you want to run experiments on. Even if your idea is not that novel or sophisticated, showing that you understand how to take a simple idea and formulate it scientifically, then evaluate it thoroughly and objectively, will make it a very strong proposal.

An example of a weak proposal would be one which primarily provides a broad literature review and a scattering of buzzwords from the field, and proposes just to work on those same topics without really showing any individual insights or providing any specific details. If your proposal is too broad, too high level, or covers too many topics, it will not come across well. Instead, try to go deep into a single idea to show that you have really thought hard about that one idea.


Contacting me

Please understand that I receive a very large number of PhD applications, and there is very little feedback I can give at this stage. However, I would still like to hear from potential applicants before making a formal application. Therefore, if you are considering applying, please complete this Google Form, to let me know a little about your background and research interests. This form helps me to manage the large number of applications I receive, so please use this form and do not email me yet. You can be sure that I will review every response I receive through this form, after which I will email you in due course to let you know whether making an official application would be appropriate.

If you have any administrative questions related to your PhD application, such as about your eligibility for funding, your English language test scores, or how to complete the official application, or if you would like to check the status of your official application after submitting it, then please contact our PhD administrator, Dr. Amani El-Kholy, at a.o.el-kholy@imperial.ac.uk.


Thank you for reading, and I look forward to hearing from you!

Edward Johns.