Doctorate (Applied Research and Innovation)

Specialisation open to final year engineering programme students only.

Overview

This specialisation offers a research programme to final year students who intend to pursue their studies with a PhD. Thus the students devote most of their final year of study to commencing research work which they will then pursue with a PhD at Centrale Nantes. The student and supervisor have a mutual moral commitment - the student commits to pursuing onto PhD, the supervisor endeavours to propose a source of funding for the PhD at the conclusion of the student's engineering programme.

Contribution to sustainable development goals

Learn more about Centrale Nantes' commitment to the 17 sustainable development goals

Admission

This specialisation is open to international students selected by our partner institutions via an exchange study programme.

Exchange Study Programme

• Selected students have the opportunity to spend a semester or a year of their studies at Centrale Nantes to obtain ECTS credits. 
• Applicants must be fluent in French (B2 level recommended) and have a Master 1st year university level with the equivalent of 240 ECTS credits (in the European system, or equivalent).
• Learn more about the Exchange Study programme

NB Most engineering programme courses are taught in French.

Course Content

From September to the end of March:

• Research work (464hrs)
• Professional Option (one day per week)
• Modern language classes and Sport (average of 3 hours per week)
• Possibility to attend some classes from the engineering programme

 

From April until the end of September:

• 6-month full-time paid internship on the thesis subject. The internship can be undertaken in a laboratory outside Centrale Nantes (including abroad), or in a company.

Download syllabus

Examples of PhD theses

• Ontological engineering for the creation and management of adaptive teaching resources.
• Behaviour of recycled concrete at earlier and later ages: influence of initial water saturation and substitution rate.
• Contribution to understanding the mechanisms of passivation in concrete reinforcements exposed to sea water: theory and thermochemical modelling.
• Virtual reality tools for universal design
• Advanced methods and multi-scale analysis for the study of the self-healing of cracks in cementitious materials.
• Ego-centred representations for the autonomous navigation of a humanoid robot.
• Influence of image features on face portraits - social context interpretation: experimental methods, crowdsourcing based studies and models.
• Deterministic modelling of large-scale sea states at variable depths.
• Predictive control and estimation of uncertain systems with delayed input.
• Model reduction method for parametric equations - application to the quantification of uncertainty.
• Input-state linearization and decoupling of nonlinear systems with delays

After the specialisation

• Academia
• Industrial Research and development

Learn more: do a PhD at Centrale Nantes