£10 million for unique Yorkshire PhD Academy

GRADTERM – the Graduate Academy for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine will offer PhD students the chance to integrate their research and skills in life sciences with engineering and physical sciences.

The Academy is the result of a successful bid by the White Rose University Consortium (White Rose) to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which will finance the Academy with £6m over a five year period. The total value of the project is £10m and includes funding from each of the three White Rose Universities, HEFCE and contributions from industry partners involved in regenerative medicine and therapies in north of England.

“Regenerative medicine and tissue engineering are huge growth areas and there’s a clear need to build academic capacity,” says Professor John Fisher, GRADTERM director and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Leeds. “There’s also great demand from industry for well trained engineers and physical scientists with a broad range of skills and knowledge who can work in an interdisciplinary environment.”

The Academy will be co-ordinated by the University of Leeds and will receive 50 PhD students over its funded period. Each student will have two supervisors throughout their studies: one from engineering and physical sciences, the other from biological sciences, providing a unique perspective on their work. The first year of the four year programmes will be spent in general training, with students then being placed in existing research groups in one of the three universities.

Says Dr Julian White, White Rose Chief Executive: “GRADTERM is underpinned by a mature network that exists between research groups in the areas of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York. The three universities have been working collaboratively since 2000, through the White Rose Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering Group, so the infrastructure is already in place to support both an influx of PhD students and the development of the new courses,” he says.

“The PhD programmes will provide an enhanced training environment,” says Prof Fisher. “Not only are they longer, there will be a great deal of input from biological scientists to provide a truly interdisciplinary experience which will encompass a range of learning experiences – from research concept through to application in a clinical environment.”

Prof Fisher believes that the Academy will encourage more interdisciplinary projects of this nature in other universities. “We want to disseminate what we’re doing across the university community to stimulate more collaborative and interdisciplinary projects of this nature,” he says. “We’re hopeful that our current programme will demonstrate how this can be addressed.”

Source: By University Of Leeds