Wellcome Sanger Institute 4-year PhD Scholarships – United Kingdom
Applications are invited for Fully Funded Wellcome Sanger Institute 4-year PhD Scholarships at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Details
Students apply to the Wellcome Sanger Institute 4-year PhD Scholarships programme rather than to specific Faculty members, and spend the first eight months of the programme undertaking three rotation projects in different research groups. This ensures exposure to different disciplines in genomics, and allows the students to gain a better overall picture of the scientific nature of the Institute and the different technologies that are available.
In particular, all students are required to carry out at least one informatics rotation and one experimental laboratory rotation. This helps students to develop wide ranging skills both at the bench and in data analysis. Students are required to write a short report or prepare a poster, and make a presentation to the group, at the end of each project. Selection of the final PhD project laboratory is by mutual consent between the student and supervisor and takes place during the third rotation period.
Monitoring of each student’s progress is achieved through the submission of a project report or the preparation of a poster for each rotation, their first year report, their third year thesis plan and by thesis committee meetings which take place every 6 months.
Benefits
Students offered one of our 4-year PhD programme funded studentships will obtain full financial support, including University tuition fees, regardless of nationality.
Number of Wellcome Sanger Institute 4-year PhD Scholarships
There will be 12 funded studentships available across all our research areas.
Since Sanger Institute studentships are extremely competitive, we also encourage you to seek your own funding. Any students with their own funding should still apply to the 4-year PhD Programme in the usual way.
Training opportunities
Students on Wellcome Sanger Institute 4-year PhD Scholarships Programme are expected to attend training courses in transferable and general research skills such as:
- Health and safety training
- Graduate lecture series (approx 30 lectures by Sanger Faculty members)
- Basic UNIX
- Python programming
- Bioinformatics courses and workshops
- Next generation sequencing
- Statistics
- Research integrity, reproducible research and ethics workshops
- Presentation skills
- Scientific writing skills
- Communication and public engagement workshop
Application
To apply for Wellcome Sanger Institute 4-year PhD Scholarships, applicants are required to complete the Wellcome Sanger Institute on-line application form and submit:
- Provide details of your academic qualifications
- Outline any relevant work experience (max 200 words)
- Choose 3 Faculty members whose research area interests you (see our Faculty and Group pages for information on Faculty members and their research areas)
- Outline your research interests and indicate how these fit with the research interests of the Sanger Institute (max 200 words)
- Write a personal statement on your research experience, research interests and career goals, explaining why you wish to pursue graduate training at the Sanger Institute (max 400 words)
- Provide details of two academic referees (one of these can be the supervisor of an industrial or research placement)
- Upload your University transcript(s) (and GRE scores if available) as a PDF file