Prospective PhD Students
I am always willing to talk to students interested in PhD research in my area. Macquarie provides excellent scholarships and support for students both local and international.
You can find out about my research area from my publications and from reading my blog posts. In general I would be interested in proposals relating to the following areas, although I am always open to discussions about potential projects.
- scientific workflows and data provenance
- query systems for linguistic annotations (or other semi-structured data types)
- speech technology, for example affective speech analysis, exploiting oral history recordings, speech information retrieval
- information retrieval from historical sources, for example entity linking in historical newspapers
To start a PhD at Macquarie, you must have completed a Masters degree with a significant research component. If you only have a Bachelor degree you will need to complete the Master of Research – a two year research training degree including coursework and a major research project. If you have completed a coursework Masters or an Honours year, you may be able to skip the first year of the MRes.
Scholarships
If you are a domestic (Australian) student you may qualify for a scholarship for the MRes. For international applicants there are fewer options for MRes Scholarships (at time of writing this, only if you are from Vietnam) but you can apply for an MRes/PhD Bundle scholarship that covers the second year of MRes and the PhD.
The main scholarships on offer at Macquarie cover the three years of a PhD. Applications usually close in July (International) or October (Domestic) but there is often an early round announced at short notice. To apply for one of these you need to first talk to your potential supervisor (me) and develop a research proposal. I am happy to help you develop this proposal – in fact I would prefer to do this as it gives me a chance to get to know you and see if we would be a good fit. So, please get in touch at any time, but be aware that your application will need to wait until the next round of scholarships.
Please be aware that Macquarie scholarships are very competitive, especially for international students. You should have strong academic results and at least one good quality publication in a journal or conference to be competitive. If your publication is in a fake conference or journal (that is, one where you paid to get it published) it will do you more harm than good; please avoid these kinds of venue.
If you would like to follow up on these opportunities, please email me (Steve.Cassidy@mq.edu.au) with your CV and a brief statement of the kind of research you would like to do.