Excellent motivated students are always welcome to join the group. Please contact ronan.mcnulty at ucd.ie if you are interested.
If you have funding already arranged for paying fees and living in Dublin, that is the ideal scenario.
If not, most students obtain funding either through the Government of Ireland postgraduate scholarship (highly competative, deadline around October the previous year) or from the School of Physics scholarship in research and training (deadline Feb/March and requires a commitment to undergraduate instruction).
A Ph.D. in particle physics is training in independent thinking, problem solving, data analysis, numeracy, scientific metholody, international collaboration, presentation skills. It sets you up for a career in a broad spectrum of employments. Here are some previous students at UCD and their current occupations.
Jonathan Anderson (Ph.D. 2009) "Testing the electroweak sector and determining the absolute luminosity at LHCb using dimuon final states", CERN-THESIS-2009-020. Engineering Manager Deutsche Bank
Karol Hennessy (Ph.D. 2010) "Characterisation and commissioning of the Vertex Locator and determining the cross-section for Drell-Yan produced di-muons at LHC", Researcher, University of Liverpool.
James Keaveney (Ph.D. 2011) "A measurement of the Z cross-section at LHCb", CERN-THESIS-2011-202. Lecturer at University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Dermot Moran (Ph.D. 2011) "Central exclusive production with dimuon final states at LHCb", CERN-THESIS-2011-209. Researcher at CIEMAT, Madrid.
Francesco Di Lorenzi (Ph.D. 2011) "Parton Distribution Function Studies and a Measurement of Drell-Yan Produced Muon Pairs at LHCb", CERN-THESIS-2011-237. Data manager, DeLoitte, Switzerland.
Zoltan Mathe (Ph.D. 2012) "Feicim: A browser and analysis tool for distributed data in particle physics", CERN-THESIS-2012-156, Research and Development Scientist at IdomSoft Zrt.
Stephen Farry (Ph.D. 2012) "A measurement of Z production using tau final states with the LHCb detector", CERN-THESIS-2012-227, Data scientist at CAVU.
Wenchao Zhang (Ph.D. 2013) "A measurement of the W boson cross-section using the LHCb detector ", CERN-THESIS-2013-178. Lecturer at Shaanxi Normal University, China.
Philip Ilten (Ph.D. 2013 ) "Electroweak and Higgs measurements using tau final states", CERN-THESIS-2013-252. Asst. Prof. at University of Cincinnati.
Ronan Wallace (Ph.D. 2015) "A precise measurement of the Z boson cross-section and a test of the Standard Model using the LHCb detector", CERN-THESIS-2015-223, Research scientist at Amazon.
Naomi Raab (Ph.D. 2022) "Exclusive production of J/ψ and ϕ mesons at the LHCb experiment", CERN-THESIS-2022-088.