The Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership

The BBSRC is funding a new generation of PhD students to work across biology, engineering, and physical sciences at the University of Oxford. This matters because many of the biggest challenges in bioscience—such as engineering crops that resist disease, developing new antibiotics, or understanding how cells repair damaged DNA—require expertise that no single discipline can provide. Traditional PhD programmes train students within one department, leaving gaps between fields. This Doctoral Training Partnership deliberately recruits students from diverse scientific backgrounds and places them in interdisciplinary projects, so a biologist might work alongside a materials scientist or a computer scientist. If the programme succeeds, it will produce researchers who can move fluidly between disciplines. That could accelerate progress in areas where breakthroughs have stalled—for instance, creating synthetic biological systems that produce new materials or medicines, or developing imaging techniques that reveal how living tissues function at the molecular level. The immediate impact is on the trainees themselves, but the long-term effect will be felt across UK bioscience as these researchers move into academic labs, industrial R&D, and policy roles. This is a fundamental investment in people rather than a specific technology, and the returns will emerge over decades.