Education

We offer postgraduate taught (MSc) and research (PhD) programmes, and we contribute to undergraduate taught programmes (BSc, MEng).

Financial Computing comprises a wide variety of subtopics within Computational Finance (algorithmic trading, financial risk management, numerical pricing of derivatives, model calibration, portfolio optimisation, agent-based models, high-performance computing, data science and machine learning applied to finance) and Financial Information Technology (blockchain technologies, smart and computable contracts, decentralised finance, digital economy).

Undergraduate taught

We supervise final year projects within the programmes

  • MEng Mathematical Computation
  • MEng Computer Science
  • BSc Computer Science

If you are an interested student, please contact a group member to agree a topic. 

Postgraduate taught

We offers four MSc programmes at the interface between finance, computer science, applied/numerical mathematics, and computational statistics:

The MSc Computational Finance has been ranked 2nd in the UK, 6th in Europe and 23rd in the world by Risk.net's Quant Finance Master's Guide 2023. The MSc Financial Risk Management follows suit among the 25-50 best in the world.

Watch a YouTube playlist of presentations of our students' summer projects.

PGIM Scholarship Programme for the MSc Computational Finance and the MSc Financial Risk Management.

Other scholarships in the UCL Computer Science Department. 

For other postgraduate programmes, see the full offer in the UCL Department of Computer Science Study pages.

Postgraduate research (PhD)

UCL Computer Science has lead the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Financial Computing and Analytics, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on a joint initiative with the Department of Mathematics of Imperial College London and with the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. The Director of the CDT has been Professor Philip Treleaven.

The CDT has offered scholarships to support 10-14 new full-time research students each year from 2008 to 2018, with the last cohort due to complete in 2022-2023. The CDT closed on 31 March 2023. Students took a first common year obtaining an MRes Financial Computing from UCL and then continued for a PhD in departments across UCL, Imperial College and the LSE (Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics).

The application for a new CDT by UCL Computer Science only was unsuccessful, and also the proposal to Faculty that the MRes Financial Computing, which has been dormant since 2019, is reactivated and complemented or substituted by a new MRes Computational Social Science with a broader scope.

Graduates interested in doing research in our group by applying for a full-time PhD should be aware that, until a new CDT will come, the funding possibilities are less abundant than we have been used to for many years:

  1. UCL Research Excellence Scholarships (RES) for 40 home and international students, China Scholarship Council (CSC)-UCL Joint Research Scholarships for 15 Chinese students, UCL Dean's Prize for waving the tuition fee of international students; the deadlines are mid January.
  2. EPSRC Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) scholarships (9 for our department), EPSRC DTP CASE scholarships (a couple per department) and EPSRC Interdisciplinary DTP scholarships (a few per faculty). EPSRC scholarships are open for home and international students, but the number of students with international fee status who may receive an offer is capped according to the EPSRC terms and conditions, so the competition in this category is particularly strong. EPSRC DTP CASE scholarships require an industrial partner that contributes 25% of the cost; for home students, this contribution is about 9,000£ per year. The deadlines have been changing from year to year, so it is advised to contact the prospective supervisor early, ideally by August if admission is desired for September of the year after.
  3. External scholarships, e.g. the WCIT Charity PhD Bursary, the Heilbronn Doctoral Partnership, the Google PhD Fellowship Program, the Google DeepMind Scholarship Program, the Sony Research Award Program, etc. 

Another possibility is an industry-based part-time PhD with half the tuition fees and up to twice the time.

In any case, the first step is to contact a potential supervisor and agree a research project, then apply online for admission to a MPhil/PhD Computer Science by January (first cycle of admissions, panel meeting in February) or April (second cyle of admissions, panel meeting in May). Please look up online the exact deadlines, which change from year to year. For most scholarships listed above it is advisable to apply to the first cycle, and for some it is required. 

Fee status 

An official fee status assessment by UCL admissions will be required for all successful applicants. As a rough guidance, UK or Irish nationals and EU nationals with settled or pre-settled status are considered home students provided they meet residency requirements, i.e. have lived in the UK, EEA, Switzerland or Gibraltar for at least 3 years immediately before the studentship begins; all others are considered international students.