How the CDT helped develop my career

The network within Bristol will give you a step up (via references and introductions, for example) into either academia or industry toward the end of your PhD. You will see for yourself how respected Bristol is internationally. In particular the historical connections to engineering (such as the industrial revolution, Concorde etc) make a PhD here a very good idea, not to mention the community of more than 150 people working in wireless networks alone, which is almost ten times as many as MIT have in the whole of their communications group, for example. 

How CDT training benefitted my research

The initial introductory year in communications is a good review of topics surrounding information theory and a wireless networks (among other things), but the ability to essentially pick and choose your supervisor from a extensive list throughout either the engineering or mathematics departments is something I will always be grateful for, since it allowed me to tailor a mix of communications and applied mathematics in a way that was perfectly aligned with my research interests. You have much more freedom this way, rather than being assigned to an existing research project with funding for a PhD student.

Background Information

I joined the CDT in 2011 having completed an MSci in Physics at the University of Bristol.

After graduating from the CDT in 2017, I held a postdoctoral research fellowship in random spatial networks at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea, a postdoctoral research associate in the Complex Systems Group at Queen Mary University of London. I am about to start a visiting position at The Max Plank Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, working on topics in spatial networks.