Bren - Admissions - Prospective Students PhD

Welcome to the pages for Prospective Bren PhD Students.

Whether your goal is to pursue professional scientific work or join a community of scholars in higher education, as a student in the mentored Bren PhD program, you'll benefit from the school’s superb facilities, smaller size, academic excellence, broad disciplinary reach, and outstanding faculty.

Bren faculty are accessible and engaged, and they form close working relationships with the students they advise. They represent a broad range of interests and expertise, and many conduct both theoretical and applied research. Because the university values interdepartmental collaboration, students whose research spans disciplines can easily work with advisors from other UCSB departments, too.

The Bren PhD track requires all the depth and rigor of a traditional doctoral program while presenting students with abundant opportunities to expand their perspectives. Research may be highly focused within an individual discipline, but students may also develop knowledge in one or more related fields, adding a valuable extra dimension to their disciplinary expertise. Other students pursue doctoral work that is inherently interdisciplinary and can only be completed by creating a collaborative team to integrate methodologies and knowledge from several fields.

This flexibility and the School’s inherent interdisciplinary perspective are what make the Bren School PhD program unique.