PHD Program

The PhD Program in Cognitive Systems is a work in progress. There is a COGS PhD Program and it is an innovative and challenging program for those with the ambition and initiative to carry out primary research involving potentially diverse disciplines. Due to constraints on graduate program structure at UBC, however, COGS cannot launch a standalone PhD program. Analogous to the undergraduate COGS program, in which COGS majors are hosted by specific academic departments (computer science, philosophy, etc.), the COGS PhD must reside within one or more academic departments.

At present, the Department of Linguistics is sole host of a COGS PhD. What does this mean?

• Applications for the COGS PhD are made through the graduate application process for Linguistics.
• Students should coordinate their admission to the COGS PhD Program with the Graduate Advisor or Graduate Admissions Coordinator in the Department of Linguistics.
• Before or during the application process, prospective students should already be thinking about the research they hope to do at UBC and should make contact with researchers, including at least one faculty member of the Linguistics Department, who can facilitate their research, potentially serve as academic advisors, and eventually serve as dissertation committee members.
• Students admitted to the COGS PhD program must complete approximately one year of course work in Linguistics before turning their full attention to their COGS research. Other coursework will be determined in consultation between students and their academic advising committees. See the Linguistics Department website for details.
• In fulfillment of the Faculty of Graduate Studies requirement to pass two qualifying examinations, students must produce two original research papers. A dissertation prospectus must also be approved, and a dissertation committee must be selected, before students may be admitted to Candidacy for the PhD.

Students interested in pursuing multidisciplinary research projects with a strong focus in Computer Science, Philosophy, or Psychology should consider applying to one of these graduate programs after establishing contact with a suitable potential research supervisor. All three departments have been at the core of the COGS undergraduate program since its inception in 2001. Many of their faculty members work directly as instructors in the COGS undergraduate program and/or indirectly as research supervisors for undergraduate research projects.

Canadian residents who intend to apply to the COGS PhD program are strongly encouraged to apply to one of the Canadian research councils (NSERC for engineering and computation; SSHRC for social science and humanities) for graduate fellowship funding.

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Further Information:

Ph.D. program requirements (Linguistics)
Financial aid
UBC Faculty of Graduate Studies: Info for prospective students
Online application system