Interested in joining us?

Funded PhD studentships and Post-Doctoral Research Associate positions at the CIT group are advertised in this page typically between October and January each academic year. Please check back frequently during this period if you are interested.

Staff

Recruiting - Digital Roads - Programme Manager

The Digital Roads of the Future initiative is looking to recruit a Programme Manager to ensure the smooth administration and running of the programmes.

The Programme Manager will take overall responsibility for the administration of the grants and associated human, physical and digital resources of the Construction Information Technology (CIT) Group led by Professor Ioannis Brilakis. The Programme Manager is supported by, and line manages, a Programme Coordinator as well as a Project Manager for the EPSRC Digital Roads Prosperity Partnership and its resources and a Senior Project Manager for the MSCA FUTUREROADS Fellowships COFUND and its resources.

The CIT Group currently leads or is involved in £65M of major and minor grants, including but not limited to leading the two above that together comprise the Digital Roads of the Future initiative. Others include EU grants CBIM, BIM2TWIN, OMICRON, AEGIR, BUILDSPACE, D-HYDROFLEX, several i-CASE PhD studentships, etc. Together, they employ over 70 staff and students. Find out more about the CIT here.

Based at the Department's Civil Engineering Building in West Cambridge, and reporting to the Director of the CIT Group, you will manage the administration of the above to plan and ensure the delivery of their day-to-day financial, IT, commercial, operational, and logistical elements as well as ensuring that all statutory reporting requirements are met. Additionally, you will be responsible for managing the relationships with partners and funding bodies, including applications, reporting, communications and change control to enable effective oversight by grant governance structures. This will involve engaging and influencing senior decision-makers across business and academia, to understand needs and priorities, to know what equates to excellence, and to lead the programme team to deliver this. You will therefore need to be comfortable creating solutions to new challenges and be effective at fostering a culture of creativity and innovation.

To find out more about the role, and to apply, please follow the link: Programme Manager - Job Opportunities - University of Cambridge.

Applications close on Tuesday, 3 June  2024. We look forward to hearing from you.

Information for Prospective Researchers
By the Laboratory Director

This information is addressed to prospective graduate students who would like to join the CIT group. Please read it carefully before submitting your application and verify that it fits your needs. I accept into the CIT group every year several prospective graduate student researchers and post docs based on the lab's current projects and funding availability. Candidates are advised to apply as early as possible, to meet the deadlines for scholarships at the University of Cambridge (see below). You must start by taking a careful look at the information provided in this website, particularly the research tab, and possibly read 1-2 of our papers to gain a better understanding of the research focus of the group. Candidates are expected to have a basic understanding and significant interest in at least one of the relevant civil, electrical or information engineering disciplines commensurate with their level of studies. This includes the following:

• Built Environment disciplines: Digital twinning & building information modelling; information technologies for construction, structural or transportation engineering and management; and intelligent automation of construction and inspection/monitoring tasks.
• Electrical/Information Engineering: basic programming skills in functional and/or object-oriented languages, preferably in C#, C++, Visual Basic, or Java; signal/image processing; computer vision; robotics.

It is understood that the actual knowledge may vary on a case-by-case basis, and students are not expected to be familiar with all of the above. It is for this reason that most incoming student researchers are expected to refresh and enhance their knowledge on these subjects by taking courses/modules and self-study in their first year with the CIT group. Hence, you are not required to know everything, but you must have at least basic knowledge of some of these subjects. You should also be willing to pick up some additional knowledge or refresh existing ones when you start here.

I expect you to be able to work with a large degree of independence (with proper supervision, of course), and to solve all small problems on your own. Normally, we organize meetings each week to discuss the progress made and potential problems/solutions.

The most important thing is that you must be really interested in your research area. Hence, I want to stress that your first task is to study all the relevant information on this website and, if necessary, contact me for more information. When working with enthusiasm, results can be achieved much faster than when just doing work to graduate. I expect that you have a certain degree of enthusiasm and that you are interested more in learning than in simply getting a degree.

I normally invite every promising applicant for a virtual interview. The purpose of the interview is to make sure that you have appropriate knowledge and skills, a piece of enthusiasm, and that you are ready to attack a complex problem with a reasonable probability of success. It is very important that you have a proper background, so you can finish your work on time and to avoid any disappointment.

If you wish to do your graduate studies under my supervision, you should have a good grade average especially on related courses and competitive test scores. If this is the case, please apply to the Department of Engineering's graduate program at the University of Cambridge; choose either the MPhil in Engineering, or the PhD (Probationary) in Engineering option, and indicate me as your potential supervisor. When you do so, please send me an email indicating your application confirmation when you receive it). Keep in mind that only complete applications will reach me and receive full evaluation. Due to a large number of applications, I will contact only competitive applicants. Students should contact GraduateAdmissions@admin.cam.ac.uk to check the status and completeness of their application file and for any non-scientific questions, such as English requirements, questions on certain application parts, and the applications online system.

Funding is available on a case-by-case basis to outstanding students (i.e., that satisfied the above criteria). Students who apply early (i.e., in October/November) can also apply to all the scholarships of Cambridge through their application. In general, I also encourage you to apply to the myriad of independent scholarship opportunities that you are eligible for at the local, national, and international level. Many research students apply to Cambridge with scholarships from their countries, non-profit organizations, or the private sector. When your application reaches me, I will also evaluate it for funding under one of the group's sponsored research projects.