About Us
The Network is a unique collaboration bringing together the relevant government sponsored scientific funding agency, the EPSRC and the three largest UK-based Pharmaceutical Research companies, AstraZeneca, Glaxo SmithKline and Pfizer. The main objective is to maintain and strengthen support for synthetic organic chemistry research, which underpins R&D in the pharmaceutical industry. The focus of the programme is the sponsorship and support of PhD studentships. The studentships are jointly funded by the EPSRC and the collaborating companies and are awarded on the basis of competitive review of proposals submitted by academics from UK universities. Initially the programme is being run as a 2-year pilot. Fifteen studentships started in October 2007 and a further 15 have been awarded to start in October 2008. Our ambition is to develop a new enhanced programme for graduate training that will allow students to develop a high level of expertise and scientific independence equal to that of their peers from leading research establishments around the world. The four year pattern of funding will also enhance the ability of UK academics to produce world-class research output. A key feature of the Network will be the sharing of the high quality training materials across leading academic institutions and industry, providing students with broader learning opportunities. The Network will build on existing strong collaborative (e.g. CASE) links between the Pharma industry and academia, by allowing more time for collaboration and industrial placements. We also aim to facilitate easier two-way transfer of knowledge and technology between academia and industry. In particular we will encourage academics to benefit from modern technologies and expertise that may be available in industry but not in the academic environment. Students will benefit by having a selected, enthusiastic industrial tutor to complement their academic supervisor and we will endeavour to provide them with a clear understanding of the activities involved in drug discovery and development. This website will be developed to allow students to share and discuss scientific results with peers across the UK. In sharing their results in this way students will develop modern techniques for communicating scientific work. They will also be given the opportunity to present their work at Network meetings. We will help students to develop their problem solving skills through a website problem forum and by encouraging them to tackle challenging synthetic problems posted by academic and industrial Network partners. Through these activities they will gain a knowledge of the broad range of projects being investigated across the Network and in the Pharma industry and they will also gain an appreciation of the levels of attainment of their peers in other departments. Research generated by the programme will be allowed to flourish because of a novel agreement concerning IP arising from the research. As the work is judged to be pre-competitive by the Pharma companies, they have agreed that the output is to be owned by universities with the objective of allowing rapid publication of quality research. Through this new way of funding research at graduate level we hope to create a new model whereby industry and research councils collaborate to fund areas of research that are vital to the UK economy, in a way that provides students with excellent training opportunities and enables UK academia to produce world-class research.
Click here for details of studentships that started in 2007
Click here for details of new studentships that will start October 2008