Edinburgh Clinical Academic Track - Inclusive (ECAT-I) PhD Programme

A doctor or nurse who also conducts research is one of the rarest and most valuable people in medicine—and this programme is designed to train more of them, especially from backgrounds that are currently underrepresented in clinical academia. The problem is straightforward: the UK’s clinical research workforce does not reflect the diversity of the patients it serves. Most clinical PhD programmes recruit almost exclusively from hospital doctors, leaving out community clinicians, allied health professionals (such as physiotherapists, paramedics, and radiographers), and researchers from ethnic or socioeconomic minorities. This narrow pipeline means that research questions are often shaped by a limited set of perspectives, and the resulting evidence may not address the needs of the full population. If the Edinburgh Clinical Academic Track – Inclusive (ECAT-I) succeeds, it will produce a cohort of clinical academics who bring different professional experiences and personal backgrounds into research. The programme explicitly adds expertise in social science, health data science, and informatics—fields that are increasingly central to modern healthcare but rarely integrated into clinical training. It also provides structured post-PhD mentorship to prevent the common loss of research momentum after graduation. The impact is not a single discovery but a sustained shift in who asks the questions and what questions get asked. Over time, this could change which health conditions are studied, how data is interpreted, and whether clinical evidence applies to the people who actually need it.