The UK’s chemical and pharmaceutical industries—worth £40 billion annually and employing 140,000 people directly—are running short of graduates who can handle automated lab equipment and the large datasets it produces. Synthetic chemistry, the science of making molecules for medicines, agrochemicals, and electronic materials, still relies heavily on manual work in glass beakers. That approach cannot keep up with the demand for faster, more reproducible reactions or the data needed to predict how new compounds will behave at industrial scale. The sector faces a projected need for 50,000 to 77,000 new recruits between 2015 and 2025, driven by retirements and a shortage of skills in automation and data science. This Centre for Doctoral Training will produce a generation of molecular scientists who combine practical chemistry with engineering, computing, and statistics—skills largely absent from current PhD programmes. Students will work on automated reaction platforms that capture every condition and outcome, generating data to build better predictive tools. If successful, the programme will supply the workforce needed to keep the UK’s chemistry-intensive industries competitive, accelerating the translation of lab discoveries into manufactured products—from new drugs to smart materials—without the current bottlenecks in scale-up and reproducibility.
View original technical description
Chemistry is a key underpinning science for solving many global problems. The ability to make any molecule or material, in any quantity needed in a prescribed timescale, and in a sustainable way, is important for the discovery and supply of new medicines to cure diseases, agrochemicals for better crop yields/protection, as well as new electronic and smart materials to improve our daily lives. Traditionally, synthetic chemistry is performed manually in conventional glassware. This approach is becoming increasingly inadequate to keep pace with the demand for greater accuracy and reproducibility of reactions, needed to support further discovery and development, including scaling up processes for manufacturing. The future of synthetic chemistry will require the wider adoption of automated (or autonomous) reaction platforms to perform reactions, with full capture of reaction conditions and outcomes. The data generated will be valuable for the development of better reactions and better predictive tools that will facilitate faster translation to industrial applications. The chemical and pharmaceutical industry is a significant provider of jobs and creator of wealth for the UK. Data from the Chemical Industries Association (CIA) shows that the chemical industry has a total turnover of £40B, adding £14.4B of value to the UK economy every year, employs 140,000 people directly, and supports a further 0.5M jobs. The sector is highly innovation-intensive: much of its annual spend of £4B on investment in capital and R&D is based on synthetic chemistry with many SME's and CRO's establishing novel markets in Science Parks across the UK regions, particularly in the South East and North West. The demand for graduate recruits by the Chemicals and Pharmaceutical industries for the period 2015-2025 is projected to be between 50,000-77,000, driven by an aging workforce creating significant volumes of replacement jobs, augmented by the need to address skills shortages in key enabling technologies, particularly automation and data skills. This CDT will provide a new generation of molecular scientists that are conversant with the practical skills, associated data science and digital technology to acquire, analyse and utilise large data sets in their daily work. This will be achieved by incorporating cross-disciplinary skills from engineering, as well as computing, statistics, and informatics into chemistry graduate programs, which are largely lacking from existing doctoral training in synthetic chemistry. Capitalising upon significant strategic infrastructural and capital investment on cutting edge technology at Imperial College London made in recent years, this CDT also attracts very significant inputs from industrial partners, as well as Centres of Excellence in the US and Europe, to deliver a unique multi-faceted training programme to improve the skills, employability and productivity of the graduates for future academic and industrial roles.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know