STRUCTURE

CODEX is sustained by a temporal, physical and virtual infrastructure that spans the network of institutional sites. This infrastructure supports the delivery of research training, career development, individual and collaborative research, tutorials, peer review, seminars and research updates. It consists of:

• CODEX Residency: This is the period In which students will be situated at each of the two institutions, comprising 50% of the PhD in the University of Plymouth (or satellite sites) and 50% in the collaborating University in China (or satellite sites). This period in residence will be augmented by participation in other research cluster activities and cultural visits.
• CODEX Lab: The Lab or studio space that CODEX research students will work in during their residency. This space requires access to and support of collaborative and individual design and fabrication activates.
• CODEX Composite Sessions: Sessions provide an intensive period where CODEX cohorts overlap and share their research and experiences. The sessions ensure that new knowledge is shared across the separate years of the community and provide a vehicle to support the Workshops and Symposia.
• CODEX Symposium: The annual public research conference/exhibition to support research dissemination to the wider research community, the public and for industrial engagement. The symposium will make use of a variety of spaces and sites, including networked and virtual environments. The Symposium also provides routes for further dissemination through a variety of digital and traditional publishing models.
• CODEX Workshops: Focused experimental design and production activates that adopt a variety of fabrication and technological methods to support experimentation and making, combined with critical theory to nurture reflexive praxis.
• CODEX Link: The Link supports communication across the research community through a variety of technologies, such as video conferencing, social media and virtual environments. This supports the management and supervisory meetings as well as collaborative projects and workshops between the UK and China. The Link also puts in place the framework to support a highly connected and interactive alumni involvement with the CODEX community.
• CODEX Tutorials: Tutorials are regular individual meetings between students and their supervisors.
• CODEX Research Network: The Network comprises each Research Laboratory or University that joins the CODEX programme to provide supervision and research facilities to support students during the Mobility period.

Residency/Mobility:

These activities break down over the 3 years as follows:

	Oct	Nov	Dec	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep
Year#1	UK Residency					RDC1
Year#2						RDC2	CN Mobility		CN Composite Session Symposium
Year#3						RDC3			CN Composite Session Symposium
Year#4	Optional								CN Composite Session Symposium

PROCESS:

Full-Time students and their supervisory team will be required to meet at least four times per year as stipulated in the University’s Research Degrees Handbook.

Normally these meetings will coincide with the CODEX Composite Sessions and tutorials, and supplemented through the CODEX Link. CODEX Composite Sessions and tutorials will include the assessment of research progress, research planning, and a review of personal skills development and public outputs of the research programme.

CODEX students follow the normal University of Plymouth Doctoral College procedures that include:

• Reporting on the progress of the research to the whole supervisory team at agreed and determined intervals between the student and the supervisors in accordance with the University’s logbook system (recorded in GradBook), but at least once every 4 months.
• Project Approval process (RDC1) in their first year of study (at 6 months of registration for Full Time) where an expert third party commentator who is not a member of that Student’s supervisory team would be assessing the academic content and quality of the proposed programme of work to ensure that it is set at the appropriate level and achievable within the timeframe provided.
• Confirmation of Route process (RDC2) in their second year of study (at 18 months of registration for Full Time students), a similar process to the RDC1 but with the aim (on successful conclusion) of student’s status transferring from an MPhil to a PhD.
• Subject to a Student’s satisfactory annual progress after the transfer to a PhD programme, submission of a thesis in English and satisfactory examination performance, CODEX Students will be eligible for the award of a PhD. Alternatively, Students may wish to submit for the MPhil award.
• A viva voce examination will take place on the University of Plymouth campus. The University of Plymouth will appoint an internal examiner and an external examiner (as nominated by the supervisory team) for each Student.

Schedule: