ILESLA, an ambitious doctoral training programme, will prepare a new generation of creative, collaborative, and entrepreneurial researchers working in life and environmental sciences who are equipped to meet the complex, cross-disciplinary challenges the world faces and enhance the UK skills base in high growth sectors. The new programme is part of a major £500 million investment in doctoral training by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Based at the University of Oxford’s innovative Doctoral Training Centre (DTC), students will initially undertake an in-depth programme of cohort-based, experiential learning to develop research skills including mathematics and statistics, programming, imaging, data science, and modelling biological or environmental processes. In their doctoral research students will tackle challenges across five interconnected themes:

• Climate and Earth - advancing understanding of climate and earth systems
• Biodiversity and Sustainability - sustainable approaches to support food, feed and energy security, manufacturing, and biodiversity
• Animal and Human Health - innovative approaches to understand and support animal and human health
• Rules of Life - frontier science addressing fundamental questions about biological organisms and ecosystems
• Transformative Technologies - development of tools and technologies underpinning biological and environmental research

Through the partnership, students will be connected to a community of over 500 research groups conducting world-leading research in the life and environmental sciences, besides a wider consortium of research centres, industry partners, and third-sector organisations.