Not at all. We will be only appointing supervisory teams once students have been offered an award. We will enter into a dialogue with both the prospective supervisors and the successful student based upon a ‘best fit’ for the project at the time of the award, and supervisory teams may run across our institutions to ensure the best possible team for the needs of the project and the candidate. There are a number of things we need to take into account forming teams, including staff having adequate experience of supervision and training, as well as staff capacity in their workload plan.

You do not need to contact any academics at the three institutions, or CDA partners, prior to submitting your application.

However, if you want to get expert advice on your application, as it develops, we suggest there are two main options.

1) You could utilise your existing networks by contacting your own prior academic mentors from previous study at your UG and PG institutions. They may be willing to provide you with advice on your developing work prior to submission. 

2) When subject specific questions are received by the central contacts at each institution, these will be anonymised and forwarded from us to the subject specialists, and we will share their response with you. 

To avoid any potential unconscious bias in the assessment process, any contact with prospective candidates will be disclosed by academics to ensure the academic panel reviewing the proposals have not had any involvement with the candidate prior to the assessment process. This is in order to maintain the rule that the identity of the author of the application is completely unknown to the reviewer, and that reviews are considered ‘blind’.

While you do not need to contact anyone, it would be useful for you to check out what are the research interests of the scholars, and what research groups and research strengths are held at each of the possible institutions you can apply to.

We are fortunate in our consortium to be able to offer students the full range of higher educational institutional types:

• A post-92 University in Oxford Brookes University

• A Russell Group in Cardiff University

• A Small Specialist Institution in Falmouth University (with a focus on the arts).

Our HEIs have shared research strengths and expertise highly relevant to our Research Vision with demonstrable supervisory capacity in the following areas (click on the links below to see the relevant research group, center and institute pages):

• Design, arts and health (Falmouth CfA&H; Brookes DTP; Cardiff DRPP)

• Designing for Sustainable and Resilient Futures (Falmouth; Brookes SRFN & OISD & CENDEP; Cardiff EEP)

• History, Culture, Society and Heritage (Brookes PCI; Cardiff HHC; Falmouth CfHC&S)

• Conservation, Regeneration and Biodiversity (Cardiff HHC & CSBC; Brookes PCI)

• Design Research (Cardiff DRPP; Brookes DTP)

• Urbanism (Cardiff U; Oxford Brookes LDD)

• Low Carbon Building, Energy, Environment, and People (Cardiff EEP & LCBE; Brookes LCB & AE) 

• Computational Design Methods and Digital Craft (Cardiff CMA; Brookes DTP).

In addition to the above, you will also need to consider what funds you may need to travel regularly to your host institution for supervision and other events if you do not live in the vicinity of their campus. 

There are two ways of earning additional money while holding an award.

1) You can take the degree part-time (working a minimum 50% of your time on the PhD, extending the award duration).

2) You may also be able to do a small amount of paid work even if you are studying full-time. Paid work is always separate from your studentship.

See the UKRI websites here for more details:

https://www.ukri.org/manage-your-award/support-for-ukri-funded-students/

Please note that if you are an international student, you would also need to consult any visa conditions, including maximum hours of paid employment possible. 

For all applicants there is general guidance on how to write a research proposal at each of our institutions. Please see the following pages:

Oxford Brookes https://www.brookes.ac.uk/getmedia/ae191e46-e60e-4c3a-8991-8fa920ecf99f/tde-research-degree-guidelines.pdf 

Falmouth - https://www.falmouth.ac.uk/sites/default/files/media/downloads/Research_Degree_Proposal_and_Application_Guid_Heidi%20Ball.pdf 

Cardiff - https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/applying/how-to-apply/writing-a-research-proposal 

Additional support is available: we have organised special one-to-one academic writing sessions, to help our widening participation agenda.

These sessions are not open to every applicant, and are intended to support:

1. Those who have been out of academic study for a long period of time (e.g. practitioners who are many years past their original degrees), 

and/or 

2. Those who identify with an underrepresented group in Postgraduate Study and the UKRI funding landscape (see the UKRI website here - particularly the Key Findings for 2023 to 2024 section - as well as the AHRC’s EDI Action Plan, to understand if this applies to you).

If either of these criteria applies to you, and you would like this one-to-one support provided by the Oxford Brookes Centre for Academic Development, please send an email to adapt-phd@brookes.ac.uk‍ and we can forward your request for an online appointment for general writing advice (this will not be topic/research specific advice provided). 

The dates for this additional support will be during working hours, either on Tuesday 17th February or Thursday 19 February (which, please note, is different from the date mentioned within our first webinar and before our next Q and A webinar). Those seeking this support will be given a zoom link to attend, and you will need to send a full draft of what you’d like to discuss by Monday 16th February to the Brookes team you will be liaising with for them to be able to assist you. You will be provided with a 40 minute discussion, and a follow-up email summarising the key discussion points.

This is possible. Please in the first instance, look at the partnerships we have already engaged and have formalised support from.

However, if you have a relevant partner you wish to engage, there is a place in the form where you can articulate for us how you see partner organisations benefiting. This is where you should outline your proposal to bring on board a different relevant partner (but please also consider here any benefits/ potential links to the partners in the consortium we already have). 

We cannot guarantee their involvement, however, and any arrangement would need to be formalised (please see also the answer to the next question in this list, as it relates to how this can be done).

We will be developing protocols and pathways to expand our collaborations if relevant and important for student’s work in due course.

Yes. There is a mechanism for this within the award framework that we would recommend, called a 'Collaborative Doctoral Award' (CDA). If the charitable/funding organisation has in-house expertise relevant to the proposed study, and is invested in supporting the study, they would need to:

• Provide some supervisory support for the project

• Allow the candidate to be based within their organisation for some of the duration of the award (up to half).

• Contribute £600 per annum for each student undertaking a CDA

The aim of CDAs is to make the candidates' expertise outward-facing to industry and to increase the potential real world impacts of the studies. CDA holders can have a candidature funding of four years as standard to allow for the extra time to be embedded in the organisation. Have a look at our Partner Organisations page of our website (and the application instructions document) to find out which collaborating organisations we have partnered with, as some have already agreed to support a CDA.

CDAs can either be arranged from the start (e.g. with one of our already signed-on partners who have agreed to support a CDA in principle) - or to be retrospectively badged as a CDA no later than in the first year of the award. The standard minimum contribution for a CDA top-up is £600 per annum per student for four years (aligned with the AHRC award, but can be more).

If it is a new partner you would be bringing to the consortium, we would have to set up a transparent process for on-boarding them and they would need to enter into a formal agreement with the consortium partners.

In terms of private arrangements to support the work, we allow for international students to seek external funding (e.g. a government fund) or use their own private funds to help support the costs of their fees as the award only covers home fee rates of university fees for PhD study.

The additional funding would need to be scrutinised if there was a chance that the funding would jeopardise the intellectual integrity and independence of the research so transparency around any potential conflicts of interest would need to be disclosed (e.g. if funding was coming from a company who would stand to financially benefit if the findings delivered a particular outcome).

There is a place in the form where you can articulate for us how you see partner organisations benefiting, this is where you should outline your proposal to bring on board a different relevant partner (but please also consider here any benefits/ potential links to the partners in the consortium we already have).

The AHRC have updated their website and links since we published the Call for Proposals document - so the links in the document no longer point to the funding guide.

Please refer to the following website for the full list of fundable research areas to check prior to submission:

https://www.ukri.org/publications/ahrc-research-funding-guide/ahrc-research-funding-guide-for-applicants/#section-annex-a:-ahrc-disciplines

We will be having a Q and A webinar for follow-up questions not covered here or in the original Information Webinar (see the recording link here if you missed it). To sign up for the upcoming Q and A webinar on 25th February 2026, please fill in our Mailing List Google Form.

Otherwise, the best email for general queries is adapt-phd@brookes.ac.uk

Otherwise, if your question is institution specific, please use the following contacts:

Emma Rowden (Oxford Brookes University) - erowden@brookes.ac.uk

Christopher Whitman (Cardiff University) - WhitmanCJ@cardiff.ac.uk

Drummond Masterton (Falmouth University) - drummond.masterton@falmouth.ac.uk