PhD Studentship: Algorithms on Strings

A fully funded PhD studentship in algorithms for 3.5 years starting in October 2026. This project aims at advancing understanding on open problems in data structures and algorithms, with a focus on strings (sequences of characters). A topic of emphasis could be approximate pattern matching. The explosive growth of sequential datasets in recent decades has brought the challenge of analysing them efficiently. Pattern matching is an action most of us perform daily when we search for a term on the web or a word in a document. In most applications, finding exact occurrences of a pattern in a text is not enough: Think of human spelling mistakes or DNA sequencing errors, for example. Computer scientists have spent great efforts in designing efficient solutions for approximate pattern matching. Several important problems, however, remain open. PhD students in the department are encouraged to undertake TA work compensated at a rate of £21.42 per hour.