This is one of those good emails from a potential PhD applicant. Slightly edited to hide the identity:

Dear Professor Nanayakkara,

This is a letter of interest for a Ph.D. studentship.

I am a student from THE COUNTRY and have got my master's degree with distinction in Control System from THE UNIVERSITY. I would like to ask if you would like to support me to secure a PhD studentship in your lab.

I am interested in the soft finger research in your lab. The soft fingertips can be used to actuate and sense objects based on their soft structure. In this case, I think it is a potential end effector, and I hope that I can take part in its research. For example, these fingertips can be applied to deformable object recognition with manipulation. Also, they can detect slip and adjust grip force during grasp and manipulation.

I have research experience in robotics and neural networks. Specifically, I control a biped robot to walk on a slope in my bachelor's graduation project. In my master's project, I introduce methods to reduce the effect of the low quality of dataset in the GAN training process. I am now working on an optical tactile sensor simulation platform and estimating force distribution based on sensor feedback. During the research, I became familiar with ROS, MuJoCo, TensorFlow, and PyTorch.

My CV is attached. I would be glad to hear your feedback, and please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Kind Regards,

Candidate Name