Call for proposals for PhDs starting in October 2023

Imperial and ICR academics are invited to submit a joint research proposal for studentships starting in October 2023. Each year we fund several highly competitive PhD Studentships, which provides a fixed annual stipend, a research consumables budget and tuition fees at the home rate for a total of four years. We are unable to support the full cost of international fees; however, offers can be made to overseas students should you secure support for the difference in international fees.

What we are looking for?

We are looking for proposals suitable for a four-year PhD project aligning to our strategic thematic area: Therapy Monitoring and Therapy Resistance; our aim is to develop technologies and methodologies to improve the monitoring of therapeutic response in cancer patients.

A key challenge for the clinician is to understand how well a therapy is working and when to change or stop a therapy. There is a need for new approaches to monitor responses to therapy more accurately and more frequently, and with lower impact on patients’ lives (i.e., less invasively and reducing hospital visits). Novel methods are needed to understand treatment resistance including innovative assays to be able to predict response at the point of diagnosis. The goal is to develop low-cost therapy monitoring technologies that will provide a readout of therapeutic response, which can be implemented in a healthcare setting to inform treatment decision making. Applicants should address the mechanisms associated with resistance to chemo, radio, and immunotherapies; how can we design technologies that will predict resistance or reoccurrence.

Proposals must:

• Address a challenge in cancer, aligned to our thematic area
• Be novel, high quality and original 
• Be feasible for a PhD student to complete within four years 
• Joint investigator led - projects must take on a convergence science approach, which will provide the student with training in multiple disciplines and the integration of novel ideas from the different disciplines. The supervisory team must have expertise spanning cancer biology and engineering or physical sciences. Pure cancer biology proposals or proposals with supervisors from a single institution will not be considered for funding.