We offer a broad programme of research opportunities
The Nottingham DLA Partnership will provide cohort-based training in frontier science across priority areas focussed upon three overarching themes: Sustainable Agriculture and Food (SAF), Bioscience for Human Health (BHH) and Biotechnology for Sustainable Growth (BSG).
Students will be recruited to specific cluster priority areas within these three overarching BBSRC priority themes. Each cluster will focus on a key challenge or emerging research priority within its theme. All clusters will include CASE projects and will be open for additional stakeholders and non-HEI partners to develop projects.
Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security
The first cluster within this research theme will be Heat Resilient Agriculture.
Currently over one billion individuals suffer from chronic malnourishment, while nearly 200 million children are severely underweight. Future environmental pressures will require farming to achieve further advances in resource use. Alongside carbon footprint, ‘energy’, ‘nitrogen’, ‘phosphorus’ and ‘water’ footprints may well become the new farming and food currencies.
Sustainable farming will rely upon multi-disciplinary approaches underpinned by sound science and the skills to translate novel solutions into practice. Reducing water and resource use, enhancing food and fuel output and quality, delivering ecosystem services and reducing greenhouse gas emissions are some of the pressing issues that will need to be tackled. Sensory science, brewing science/fermentation projects are also included in this research area. Research projects in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security will focus on studies at the molecular, cellular, whole organism, and population levels to address these issues
Bioscience for Human Health
The first cluster within this research theme will be Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering & Drug Delivery
Projects in our Bioscience for Health theme will focus on maintaining health and wellbeing. This will include projects considering the molecular regulation and control of complex processes, including cancer and ageing and the impact of nutrition and physiological changes upon health and disease.
The work researchers in this area undertake will help to provide understanding of healthy systems to generate fundamental and applied knowledge regarding stress and diseased states in human and animal systems, and understanding of how this can be manipulated for optimal health.
Biotechnology for Sustainable Growth
The first cluster within this research theme will be Technologies for Sustainable Protein Synthesis.
This cluster focuses on different platforms for production of recombinant proteins of industrial interest. Each PhD project will deploy a different protein expression platform to generate diverse proteins. Our established platforms include Escherichia coli, yeast, plant and mammalian cells and algae. Some examples of types of proteins of major industrial interest today that will be the focus of some of the projects are protein or peptide delivery systems, antigens and antibodies.
Embedded in all these projects is sustainability whereby ease of manufacture, low-cost production, feasibility of scale-up are all important factors for commercialisation. Students and supervisors in this cluster will meet throughout the programme for cross-fertilisation of skills and ideas and to work closely as a community. Some of the common skills that will be learned in this cluster are in silico modelling, gene cloning, optimising conditions for protein production, protein purification and characterisation, and testing protein functionality in assays, for example activities in in vitro and ex vivo models.
Students will graduate with a rounded, diverse skill set sought after by employers in the biotech sector in both industry and academia.
How to apply