Invitation for PhD Applications

🎓 ❮PhD Applications for 2025/26 Academic Year❯: Applications for the HKU Department of Architecture’s 2025/26 PhD intake are now open. We are excited to participate in this process for the first time and look forward to hearing from prospective candidates.

🔍 ❮Research Interests❯: We welcome applicants from a range of disciplines (e.g., civil/mechanical engineering, architecture, systems engineering, computer/data science, mathematics, etc). If you're interested in areas like computational structural design & modelling, layout optimisation, building automation, digital manufacturing, reinforcement learning, or physics/graph-based deep learning methods, I’d love to hear from you. Possible research areas include (among others):

* Multi-criteria, multi-scale structural topology, and building layout generation
* Machine learning-assisted amortisation of structural design optimisation problems
* Equilibrium-based approaches to structural form-finding
* Adaptive and structurally informed workflows in digital manufacturing
* Automation in construction and building design with foundation models
* Integration of physics with graph-based machine learning and reinforcement learning

📈 ❮Grade Requirements❯: While the university requires a GPA of 3.7/4.0 or higher in your bachelor’s degree, I place equal importance on the quality of your work and research potential. Feel free to reach out to discuss your qualifications.

📅 ❮Application Deadline❯. Please note that the department will begin reviewing applications on 1 November 2024, with a hard university-wide deadline on 1 December 2024 (HKT 23:59, GMT+8)! If you are seeing this message after 1 November, please apply as soon as possible here. For any questions, feel free to reach out at kmmt@hku.hk.

💼 ❮About the Programme❯: The scholarship provides approximately HKD 240,000 per year for four years, with additional travel allowances, access to accommodation, and healthcare services.

🌍 ❮Commitment to Diversity❯: Diversity in ethnicity, gender, and background is a cause I deeply care about and is highly valued. Please note that all instruction at HKU is conducted in English.

🧑‍🏫 ❮Past Supervision Experience❯: I am supervising two doctoral students in Germany and co-advising students in both Germany and Switzerland. I look forward to supervising students here at HKU.