Industry Studentships with Interdisciplinary Life and Environmental Science Landscape Award (ILESLA)
We are not currently planning an admissions round directly to the SABS programme for 2025 Entry.
However, a new programme sharing many of the themes of the SABS programme and also offering the chance for strong interactions with industry partners is starting at the Doctoral Training Centre.
The world faces unprecedented challenges, from climate change and food security to infectious diseases, biodiversity declines and sustainability. The Interdisciplinary Life and Environmental Science Landscape Award (ILESLA) will train a new generation of creative, collaborative and entrepreneurial researchers who are equipped to meet these complex, cross-disciplinary challenges. These future leaders will have the knowledge and skills to generate innovative solutions that integrate science across BBSRC and NERC remits, and to conduct curiosity-led research that generates far-reaching insight into biological and environmental systems, and their interactions.
Students will tackle research challenges across five interconnected themes representing the strengths and breadth of research within the partnership :
- Climate and Earth
- Biodiversity and Sustainability
- Animal and Human Health
- Rules of Life
- Transformative Technologies
Read more about these themes here
Industry Partnerships and Open-OIIC Studentships
The Open Innovation Industrial Consortium (Open-IIC) brings together an alliance of industry partners who are interested in undertaking research at the frontiers of life and environmental science. Participation in Open-IIC is subject to a Open Innovation agreement; all projects offered through Open-IIC will be industry-derived and jointly supervised by the industrial partner and an academic supervisor at the University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University or the Open University, as well as supervisors employed by other ILESLA partners. Our industrial partners will also actively contribute to training offered within ILELSA. A subset of ILELSA students who are committed to working with industry will hold Open-IIC studentships and will undertake research projects with one or more Open-IIC partners. Students within the main programme will be able to optionally choose Open-IIC projects if they are not taken up by students holding Open-IIC studentships.
Open-IIC projects will be selected through a 2-rotation project process, so that an informed choice can be made by students. This means that the supervisory team, student and industry partner can design substantive DPhil/PhD projects that build on understanding developed through the rotations of mutual interests, capabilities and strengths.
In practical terms the open IP approach ensures that all student research is visible to all partner organisations, and if any IP arises from that work then the company sponsoring the research has first refusal on exploiting that research (jointly with the university, universities or research organisations at which the student is registered and at which the students’ supervisors are employed). From a student perspective this means that students can talk freely to each other and to all of the academic supervisors without concerns about IP, so we can build a true cohort approach.
