Global doctoral scholarships 2024-2025: Awarded projects
The Global doctoral scholarship programme at St Andrews is a scheme that allows us to build long-lasting collaborations at PhD level with our key and strategic partners around the world. Each year the scheme awards funding to support doctoral research into specific projects defined by a team of co-supervisors.
Global doctoral scholarships are funded through St Leonard’s College, the postgraduate college at St Andrews. Funding varies depending on the specific partnership, but for St Andrews it always provides a full tuition fee scholarship as well as a UKRI-rate stipend for the time spent at St Andrews, with periods spent at partners funded at similar rates.
Successful applicants are awarded the funding and invited to apply to the two universities involved. Global PhD programmes, often known as “co-tutelles”, provide the ability for doctoral students to undertake research at both St Andrews and a nominated partner institution and with two (or more) academic supervisors. These programmes encourage wider research collaboration than for many standard PhDs and give an international focus whilst making the most of subject-matter expertise from a range of partners. They lead to a jointly awarded degree from the two institutions and involve at least 12 months of research at each university, and where funded through this scheme usually expect a 50/50 split in terms of duration spent at one institution or the other.
Our closest strategic partner, the University of Bonn, is one of our co-funding institutions alongside Macquarie University in Australia. Other partners also participate depending on supervisor proposed projects to an annual call.
The call for supervisor-led projects closed in September 2023 and awards were made at the end of the year. Advertisements are now available for student application for most projects, at the University scholarship website, with more opportunities to be made available by the middle of February 2024 for entry to the PhD in the academic year 2024-2025.
The selection committees awarded funding to seven projects this year. The successful projects are:
With the University of Bonn:
- Quantum simulation with multimode cavity QED, Prof. Jonathan Keeling (Physics & Astronomy, St Andrews) and Prof. Dr. Corinne Kollath (Bonn)
- Forging a digital twin of the gut-brain axis: a computational collaboration between St Andrews, Bonn and Emory Universities Dr Stefan Pulver (Psychology & Neuroscience, St Andrews) and Prof. Dr. Michael Pankratz (Bonn)
- Marine mass transport processes: Poorly quantified shuttles of organic carbon to the deep ocean, Dr Craig Smeaton, Prof. William Austin (Geography & Sustainable Development, St Andrews), and Prof. Dr. Christian Maerz (Bonn)
- Use of a Scattered Light Integrated Collector (SLIC) for point of care testing to detect bacteria in synovial fluid from native and prosthetic joint infections, Dr Phillip Walmsley, Dr Robert Hammond (Medicine, St Andrews), and Prof. Dr. Dieter C. Wirtz, Prof. Dr. Frank A. Schildberg (Bonn)
With Macquarie University:
- Preclinical studies investigating novel targets for the treatment of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS/MND), Prof. Gareth Miles and Dr Ilary Allodi (Psychology & Neuroscience, St Andrews), and Prof. Julie Atkin and Prof. Ian Blair (Macquarie)
With Sorbonne University:
- Enhancing Dynamic Algorithm Configuration via Theory-guided Benchmarks, Dr Nguyen Dang (Computer Science, St Andrews), and Dr. Carola Doerr (Sorbonne)
With the Université de Montréal
- What can scholarly publishing practices tell us about the transformations of the global scientific community, c.1900 to 2000?, Prof. Aileen Fyfe (History, St Andrews) and Prof. Vincent Larivière (Montréal)
The 2024 call of the Global doctoral scholarships scheme will be launched later this semester for projects designed to attract students to PhD programmes beginning in the 2025-2026 academic year. More information will be made available on the Global PhDs website and questions to the Global Office are welcomed at [email protected]