Openings

We, the Sustainability & Machine Learning Group, are a supportive, collaborative and inclusive team working on probabilistic modeling, data-efficient machine learning, reinforcement learning, climate science and robotics. We are part of UCL’s Centre for Artificial Intelligence, a vibrant, open and collaborative research and learning environment.

We very much welcome and support applications from underrepresented groups and from people of all shapes, shades, and genders. If you are uncertain about your possible role in our team, please do not hesitate to get in touch with Marc Deisenroth or Maria Pérez-Ortiz.

If you are interested in joining us, please consider the options below:

PhD Positions

PhD within SML Group

  • María Pérez-Ortiz does not consider PhD applications for a start in 2025.
  • Marc Deisenroth is looking for PhD students starting in 2025 working on probabilistic machine learning for weather, climate or nuclear fusion. Challenges we are interested in solving include data assimiliation, statistical downscaling, surrogate modelling, physics-informed machine learning, nowcasting, or end-to-end forecasting, for example.

If you want to get in touch regarding PhD options within the SML group, starting in September 2025, please fill out this expression of interest (we will not consider applications by email), which will ask you to submit

  • CV
  • Transcript of records
  • Research proposal (approximately 4-8 pages)
    • Description of what excites you
    • A lay summary (which can be read by someone, who is not from the field) of your research proposal (up to 200 words)
    • Literature overview (what do other people currently do in the area you are interested in?)
    • How would you fill in existing gaps?
    • A concrete 6-months project you wish to start your PhD with (including timeline)

Download template for research proposal

By mid December, we will review all expressions of interest and get in touch with you to discuss next steps.

If you are unsure about anything or have questions, please do get in touch.

Note: This is not an official application to UCL’s PhD program.

You will have to apply through the general PhD admissions site, and you will also see UCL’s various degree programs.

Here is a list of PhD programs within UCL’s Computer Science department.

In general, we encourage you to apply to all possible PhD degrees, because you may get funding in one degree, but not in a second one (and they don’t communicate to each other in the background).

We will normally not consider applicants to UCL’s PhD program, who did not submit an expression of interest.

Funding and Scholarships

Note: Currently, we have no direct funding for PhD students. However, there are some scholarships available, e.g., through the university. There are some overseas scholarships available at UCL. Please do look around and see whether you find other suitable scholarships.

Post-doc and Research Fellow Positions

If you want to propose a collaboration based on an externally-funded post-doctoral scholarship, please get in touch. Here are some potential funding opportunities:

Internships

Unfortunately, we cannot offer internships.