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Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD bursary to commence in October 2024. 

The PhD will be based in the Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and will be supervised by Dr Vasileios Karagiannopoulos, Dr Amy Meenaghan and Dr Paul Gilmour.

The successful applicant will receive a bursary to cover tuition fees for three years and a stipend in line with the UKRI rate (£18,622 for 2023/24). Bursary recipients will also receive a £2,000 research allowance to cover conference/ training costs and consumables.

Costs for student visas and immigration health surcharges are not covered by this bursary. For further guidance and advice visit our international and EU students ‘Visa FAQs’ page.

With the advent of the Internet, human activity started manifesting in a different space, that of cyberspace. Cyberspace activity soon gave rise to opportunities for new or reimagined offences, from hacking, to online fraud and cyberbullying. For the past 30 years we have been exploring crime and deviance and their regulation in online spaces. Yet, we are currently at the cusp of a transitional stage where technologies such as Augmented and Virtual Reality as well as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence will gradually reinvent the way criminal activity occurs in virtual spaces. As with every revolutionary step of similar kind, discussions on how to prepare to prevent and react to such incidents will inevitably follow a slower developmental course to the technologies themselves.

We are already seeing VR environments (what we call Metaverse) starting to become more mainstream, mainly via gaming platforms and other leisure activities, but also workspace related applications, and there are considerations regarding and even terrorism-related activity in those spaces from multiple stakeholders. This is further exacerbated by the challenges posed by of creating fake identities and bypassing authentication controls, which poses additional layers of difficulty in terms of crime prevention mechanisms, but also investigating offences in this space.

The proposed PhD project will engage with relevant stakeholders (tech companies and government agencies) with the aim of shedding light on the above phenomena by critically exploring and analysing the different crime challenges that users, regulators and law enforcement agencies will face in relation to Metaverse and AI-facilitated identification spoofing techniques. The project will aim to provide recommendations for more effective and efficient methods to prevent such behaviours and investigate offences when they happen.

How to apply

We’d encourage you to contact Dr Vasileios Karagiannopoulos  (Vasileios.karagiannopoulos@port.ac.uk) to discuss your interest before you apply, quoting the project code.

When you are ready to apply, you can use our . Make sure you submit a personal statement, proof of your degrees and grades, details of two referees, proof of your English language proficiency and an up-to-date CV.  

You should also submit a research proposal (max. 2000 words) explaining how you would take this project forward if successful. Your proposal should include:

• your main focus within the broad project topic, and the specific research questions you would address.
• the critical literature on which you would draw.
• the research methods you would use, and rationale for using these.
• a draft timeline for completion, highlighting key project milestones.

Our ‘How to Apply’ page offers further guidance on the PhD application process.

If you want to be considered for this funded PhD opportunity you must quote project code SCCJ8770124 when applying. Please note that email applications are not accepted.