Royal Holloway has just become a new member of the London Interdisciplinary Doctoral Training Partnership, (LIDo), which received funding for a further five years' of funding by the UKRI Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
The funding via LIDo, represents an investment of more than £20m in the development of future bioscience researchers and the award, from 2020 onwards, will fund 190 PhD studentships, of which a minimum of 55 are earmarked as industrial collaboration ‘CASE’ studentships.
LIDo also welcomes four new associate partners, Unilever, Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Food Standards Agency and the Animal and Plant Health Agency. Each associate partner will contribute at least three additional studentships, as well as providing projects and collaborative opportunities for LIDo students.
Professor Vincent Jansen, Head of Department for Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, said: “We are very pleased to have joined the LIDo partnership and are delighted with the funding it was allocated.
“The LIDo consortium will provide a powerful platform for collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, which will bring together researchers in biology, psychology and computer science at Royal Holloway, with other leading London universities and external partners.
“This offers a fantastic opportunity for graduates with a background in biological, biomedical, veterinary, physical, computational, engineering or mathematical sciences, interested in multi-disciplinary research.”
Around half of the studentships will be for projects jointly supervised in two different LIDo institutions, reflecting the highly collaborative and interdisciplinary training mission of the programme.
LIDo has a particular emphasis on combining biology with computational, materials and physical sciences and provides intensive training in coding for biologists and for students with a physical/computational sciences background.
It also emphasises equality and diversity through outreach activities and coaching for minority applicants, as well as summer undergraduate placements for students studying at less research-intensive institutions across London and the South East.
The other LIDo partners are University College London, King's College London, Queen Mary, University of London, Royal Veterinary College, Birkbeck College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Greenwich University's Natural Resources Institute.
More information can be found here on BBSRC Doctoral Training partnerships (2015-19).
