Lancaster, Liverpool and Manchester Universities have been jointly awarded an ESRC Doctoral Training Centre through which 63 studentships are available, for students beginning their PhD training in October 2011.

Up to four of these studentships are available at Lancaster for PhD projects in Quantitative Methods, and are open to suitable candidates.

Lancaster has exceptional strength in quantitative methods for the social sciences, which is primarily based in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics or in the School of Health and Medicine.

In the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the Applied social Statistics group led by Prof Brian Francis has a long-established reputation as one of the UK’s strongest research groups in Social Statistics, with a strong focus on quantitative criminology, quantitative sociology, social research methods and social medicine.  Current research areas include longitudinal latent variable techniques, latent transition analysis, IRT models, statistical modelling of longitudinal categorical data, statistical linguistics and  financial statistics. Joint supervision with a second supervisor in the relevant social science discipline is common.

In the School of Health and Medicine, the CHICAS group led by Prof Peter Diggle has an international reputation in the development and application of spatial and longitudinal statistical methods and their substantive application in thehealth sciences, with a particular focus on social, environmental and tropical disease epidemiology. PhD projects are often linked to collaborative partners in the UK and internationally: current examples include the National Health Service and the Health Protection Agency (UK), the World Health Organisation (Switzerland), the African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control (Burkina Faso), Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Yale Universities (USA) and Fiocruz  Research Foundation (Brazil).

Candidates for these studentships should provide a full CV together with a covering letter explaining their motivation for undertaking PhD studiesand an indication of their specific interests within the general area of statistical methods relevant to the social sciences and/or in applications to particular areas of the social sciences. Applications involving the secondary analysis of survey and administrative datasets are particularly welcome.

Applications are now closed for 2011 entry.

Please send applications to:

Informal inquiries about these studentships are encouraged  by e-mail to  Brian Francis