SI Faraday Training

This grant funds doctoral training partnerships—structured postgraduate education programmes run by research organisations across the UK. The problem is straightforward: the UK needs a steady pipeline of skilled researchers to keep its science and innovation sectors competitive. Without coordinated funding for PhD training, individual universities would struggle to offer the breadth of supervision, industry placements, and interdisciplinary projects that modern research demands. The grant addresses that gap by supporting consortia of universities and research institutes to train cohorts of doctoral students together. If the training succeeds, the impact is a generation of scientists, engineers, and analysts equipped to work across academia, industry, and government. These are the people who will design better batteries, improve crop yields, develop new medical imaging techniques, or strengthen cybersecurity—work that rarely makes headlines but quietly underpins everything from energy grids to food supply chains. This is primarily an education and skills investment, not a specific research project. There is no single discovery to describe. The value lies in the people trained, not in a particular result. Similar training programmes in the past have produced the researchers who later developed MRI, fibre optics, and mRNA vaccine technology—none of which were the original goal of the training itself.