Welcome to the Fusion Engineering CDT and congratulations on your PhD/EngD offer.

Home campus tasks

You are expected to arrange your accommodation at your home campus before w/c 28th Sept, and have attended your university registration event to collect your ID card and complete the registration steps - this will trigger your stipend payment.  If you have any problems please let us know.

You will also recieve your university email and ID - we need to know both of these important pieces of information - as we will use your local university email in our regular communications with you. Please send the details to Fran as soon as you have them.

You should also arrange to meet with your supervisor to discuss how you will arrange your supervisory meetings, arrange a desk, laptop or PC etc. You should attend local orientation and induction events - and ensure you have completed all the local PGR on-boarding tasks.  If there is a clash between a local induction event and a CDT event, please let us know - often Faculties run a second induction event for late arrivals - this might be a better option, as we only run the CDT activities once.

Partnership registration at the University of Manchester

All CDT students that are based at universities other than Manchester will be given ‘partnership registration’ at Manchester. You do not need to take any action - partnership registration will be arranged for you by the CDT. We use the details you give us in the Microsoft Form (linked below) to enroll you. All information is treated as highly confidential. Information will be used to ensure we can provide you with the best support and to start the registration process.

You will be asked, by the Admissions Team, to complete an online Right to Study check and a Criminal Conviction Declaration. These are mandatory for registration.

You will receive an @manchester email address, and a Manchester ID number once you have been enrolled by the Registration team and attended the Manchester Students Union to complete your registration - you will need to show personal ID, so please bring this with you to the induction.

Manchester University uses Outlook and Teams, so please add these apps to your phone and PC, and ensure you can access your @manchester email and MyManchester.

Add your bank details to MyManchester (so that you can receive the CDT Protium training bursary!)

The University of Manchester uses the ‘Duo’ app for its multi-factor authentication, so you should download this app to your phone.

You must complete our Onboarding MS Form by Friday 14th August: 2026 Cohort- Onboarding Information – Fill out form

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Week 1. Monday 28th Sep - Thursday 1st October - INDUCTION!

All students are expected to attend the Induction Week at the University of Manchester  - unless under exceptional circumstances. You must make us aware of any conflicting commitments immediately, if you think you will not be able to attend.  During the induction all main meals are provided, therefore we do not expect any expense claims for food or drinks. 

Travel & Accommodation - Accommodation will ordinarily be arranged for all non-UoManchester students.

Fran will arrange your train travel to Manchester for the induction only, as the timeline is too short for enrollment to induction. Ater induction, all students must use Key Travel at the University of Manchester to arrange all train tickets and eligible hotel accommodation - this will require you to register with Key Travel and create a full profile using your @manchester email.

Please note, as part of the University’s sustainable travel policy, the use of private vehicles will only be permitted when all other means of transport i.e trains, buses etc. are impractical. Please email us if you have any queries regarding this.

Accommodation is provided when the train journey from your home university train station to the training location is greater than one hour.

Please advise us in the Onboarding MS Form if you DO NOT require a hotel room for the Welcome Week period - we assume that all non-Manchester students will require accommodation, and that no Manchester students will require accommodation - but this is not always the case. 

Please take a browse around the site to read other important information.

Protium (weeks 2-12)

All in-person CDT training is at either Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham or Sheffield University.

• Training is delivered in a hybrid format;

• Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays are delivered online and synchronously (i.e. live) with resources accessed via Canvas at the University of Manchester.

• Wednesday afternoons and Thursday mornings are in-person training on a partner university campus

• You will need to organise your travel using the Key Travel system, which you will have full access to once you register at UoM. You will be able to select your own trains and send this as an itinerary to Fran, who will process this for you. You can find more information on the Budgets page. Ordinarily, you should arrange your return train journey to travel home on a Thursday afternoon.

• The CDT will arrange a hotel for the Wednesday night for students that are away from their home campus.

• Students will be receiving a stipend uplift to cover subsistence costs for both lunches and their dinner as part of the in-person cohort training programme. See more information on the Budgets page.

If requested, you will be issued with a basic Windows laptop that you will keep for semester 1 of Year 1, to complete the CDT core training. If for any reason you cannot attend any scheduled online or in-person workshop, recorded material and resources should be available on the Virtual Learning Environment (Canvas).

Protium is designed to be an intensive and general ‘fusion’ introduction. You will not be expected to do much research during this period, and should focus on the training. The course has been designed to cover a broad spectrum of topics and employs expertise from the partner Universities and members of the CDT Industry Expert Advisory Board. It may be that you have a good level of knowledge already for some parts of the training - as we have students from a wide variety of backgrounds, it is inevitable that some sections may be familiar to some. Please attend all the training sessions, and share your knowledge with your cohort peers.

You may have an opportunity to teach other students (most often undergraduates) at your home university. This is typically a positive experience and you are encouraged to get involved in teaching activities. However, the first 3 months will be dominated by the intensive CDT training, and we therefore make a strong recommendation that you delay any teaching activities until you have completed this part of the training programme.

Assignments - An informal ‘assignment’ may be given at the end of a themed week to confirm that you understand the learning outcomes. It is important that you complete these assignments to embed your learning - this will help you identify competencies for your CEng portfolio.

Please note that the details of the training may be updated throughout the year.