Oxford is training a new generation of researchers to bridge the gap between molecules and whole organisms—a skill set that currently barely exists. Systems biology treats living systems not as a collection of parts but as integrated networks. Traditional biology excels at isolating individual genes or proteins, but struggles to predict how they behave together. This training centre addresses that gap by teaching graduates from physics, engineering, and biology to combine computational modelling with experimental data, from the scale of a single protein up to an entire cell or organism. The immediate output is people, not products. Over the course of the programme, dozens of PhD students will emerge with the ability to work across disciplines that rarely interact. If successful, these researchers could accelerate progress in drug development, synthetic biology, and personalised medicine—fields where understanding whole-system behaviour matters more than knowing individual components. The research itself is fundamental science: it aims to build a theoretical and experimental framework for how biological systems work as wholes. Similar cross-disciplinary training programmes in the past have seeded entire fields, from bioinformatics to systems neuroscience.
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The Oxford Doctoral Training Centre in Systems Biology (SysBio DTC) was established at the start of the 2007/8 academic year with funding from the EPSRC and BBSRC. The SysBio DTC is one of two programmes within the Oxford Doctoral Training Centre, the other being the Life Sciences Interface Programme (also EPSRC funded) which was established in 2002 and renewed in 2007. The SysBio DTC provides a comprehensive training programme for graduates from both the physical and life sciences wishing to undertake research careers in the exciting new interdisciplinary field of Integrative Systems Biology. The SysBio DTC has its own distinctive research programme that is strongly aligned to that of the University's new Centre for Integrative Systems Biology (OCISB). Together these two centres act within the University as a focus for and catalyst of a rapidly expanding and extensive research activity in Systems Biology. The research focus of the SysBio DTC is to develop a systems approach to bridging the gap between theoretical and experimental knowledge from the level of individual molecules to the level of the whole cell / organism. Students are empowered by the DTC to take a completely new perspective on systems biology research, with the knowledge, skills and ability to draw upon a wide range of techniques from multiple disciplines not usually found in any individual researcher. Even at this early stage, we are confident that this approach will yield major advances in this new, exciting, and complex field.
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