During Welcome Week, you will attend to practicalities (e.g. registration, etc.) but also meet staff and students through a series of social events designed to help you settle into your new environment.

At the start of the PhD programme, you will participate in an 8-month training period (Technology and Automation Training Experience or TATE) designed to strengthen your research techniques and introduce new technologies for chemical synthesis.

The main goal of TATE is to enable you to make an informed PhD choice. You will develop research proposals in brainstorming sessions and undertake short rotations in synthetic chemistry labs - contributing to the group’s research aims - before selecting your PhD project.

In addition, we provide training on automated synthesis, computational methods for synthesis design and new reactor technologies, alongside research lectures by world-renowned academics, who are leaders in their fields.

You will also benefit from developing a range of transferable skills (including presentation, teamwork and problem-solving) through a series of workshops, virtual lab experiments and a journal club.

Having explored potential research projects in chemical synthesis during the Brainstorming sessions, you will choose your preferred areas of research in May, and will start working on your three-year PhD research project in June of Year 1. Find out more about the PhD project areas.