Discover where your questions could take you
You don’t need to know exactly where your research journey will lead before you begin.
You might already have an area you want to explore, a problem you have encountered in your career or simply a question you can’t stop thinking about. SustAI gives you the time, training and support to take that interest further.
Making a Change
Explore the research themes
Discover how SustAI researchers are using AI to rethink transport and logistics, create more sustainable energy systems and buildings, reduce waste and improve operational sustainability, protect the natural environment while also exploring how AI itself can become more sustainable.
See ideas become research
Explore the projects already taking shape across SustAI and see how researchers, together with industry and institutional stakeholders, are turning early questions into work with the potential to make a lasting difference.
Become a postgraduate researcher
A SustAI PhD is not simply about gaining another qualification. It is a professional step into research: developing the advanced skills, experience and confidence to investigate complex problems, work across disciplines and contribute to solutions with real-world relevance.
Research with purpose. AI with responsibility.
AI has enormous potential to help us live and work more sustainably. But the technology also has an environmental footprint of its own.
SustAI tackles both sides of that challenge. Our research explores how AI can improve transport, energy and buildings, resource efficiency and the natural environment, while also investigating how AI itself can use less energy and fewer resources.
At the same time, we recognise that good intentions only take us so far. For a sustainable solution to make a lasting difference, it has to work for the people and organisations expected to use it. It needs to be practical, accessible and capable of fitting into the realities of everyday life.
That means looking beyond one technology or isolated fix. We consider what a solution changes elsewhere, who can benefit from it, what it costs and whether it can work at scale.
Our students bring together technical ambition, critical thinking and a clear understanding that good solutions must work for people, for business and for the planet.
Articles
Work on something that matters
Use AI to explore the challenges that will shape the future of energy and buildings, transport, sustainable operations and the natural environment – or turn the question back on AI itself and explore how the technology can become more sustainable.
Your research could become part of something much bigger.
Why SustAI is different
Applying AI to the sustainability challenges of our time.
The future won't be shaped by artificial intelligence or sustainability in isolation. Increasingly, the two are becoming inseparable and the questions facing society today are too complex to sit neatly within a single discipline.
Projects, perspectives & possibilities
How ideas become research that can make a difference
One of the biggest misconceptions about doctoral research is that every postgraduate researcher arrives with a fully formed research proposal and a clear plan for the next four years. In reality, the process is often much simpler: a question might spark your curiosity, or you see an opportunity to address a problem you've encountered in your career or improve the way something works.
Bring your perspective
The way you see a problem can change where the research leads. Bring your experience, curiosity and ideas to a programme where different disciplines and perspectives come together to explore new possibilities.
Who does a PhD?
There is no single route into doctoral research. You might be continuing your studies, returning to education, changing direction or bringing years of professional experience. Wherever you’re starting from, your perspective could shape the questions that matter next.