The Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship Program in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) was launched in 2004 by Microsoft Research Cambridge, United Kingdom and has so far supported more than 200 PhD students from more than 18 countries and 51 institutions.
The online submission tool for 2019 projects goes live on September 17 and the deadline for submissions is October 8, 2018.
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How it works
Nominated PhD supervisors from academic institutions in EMEA submit their proposals for collaborative research projects with Microsoft Research Cambridge. Applications are then peer reviewed and a number of projects selected for funding. PhD students are appointed to the selected projects and begin their research in the following academic year under the supervision of their academic supervisor, with co-supervision from a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Some of the PhD students may also be offered—at the sole discretion of Microsoft Research—an internship in one of the Microsoft Research laboratories. Get further details on the Microsoft Research careers page.
For an application to be considered, the following key requirements apply:
- The institute agrees to the terms and conditions in the PhD Term Sheet and EPSRC Term Sheet where appropriate. Project selections are final; there is no appeals mechanism.
- Applicants from academic institutions must be nominated by a Microsoft supervisor by September 1 2018 to be eligible to submit an application.
- The proposed research projects must be closely related to Microsoft Research in Cambridge research vision, which includes:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Infrastructure for the Cloud
- The Future of Work
- Biological Computation
Of particular interest are proposals related to:
- Machine Learning for Healthcare
- Optics in the Cloud (networking, storage and compute)
- Confidential Computation
- Designing AI for Human Partnership
PhD students have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge research supervised by a Microsoft Researcher and university supervisor on either a three-year or four-year basis if the project is EPSRC-CASE funded.
Get details on all relevant dates and milestones EMEA PhD Scholarship website.
Artificial intelligence 
Hardware and devices 
Human-computer interaction 
Medical, health and genomics 
Programming languages and software engineering