PhD Research

Developing a research proposal in the open — questions, literature, methodology, and supervisor alignment.

I’m developing a PhD proposal in the open. This section documents that process so it reads the way a supervisor would want it to: a candidate who is already thinking like a researcher — framing questions, engaging the literature, and being honest about gaps and limitations.

Proposed research title

[Working title — refined as the proposal develops.]

Research problem

[The core problem, in a few sentences: what is not yet understood or not yet done, and why it matters.]

Research questions

[The specific, answerable questions the thesis would address.]

Literature review notes

Structured notes on the papers I’m reading — what each claims, how it shows it, what I’d push on, and how it connects to the proposal.

Key academic papers

[A curated, growing reading list with one-line relevance notes.]

Research gaps

[Where the current literature stops — the openings a thesis could occupy.]

Methodology ideas

[Candidate methods and study designs, with their trade-offs.]

Supervisor alignment

[How the proposed work aligns with the research of the groups and supervisors I’m targeting — matched to specific interests rather than stated in general terms.]

Datasets

[The data the work would require, and how it would be sourced and handled.]

Experimental roadmap

[A sequenced plan of experiments from proposal to thesis.]

Ethics and limitations

[Ethical considerations, data governance, and the honest limitations of the approach.]

Publication targets

[Candidate venues for the work.]