The South West Doctoral Training Partnership (SWDTP) Health and Wellbeing pathway enables students to cultivate a range of skills to develop and evaluate interventions and strategies to improve health behaviour. Your work will make a major impact on understandings of the social science underpinnings of avoidable health problems, and will build research capacity at the interface of biomedical and social sciences within and beyond academia.

All students have two supervisors from different disciplinary perspectives on Health and Wellbeing. Students proposing cross-institutional supervision are particularly encouraged. Your supervisors will convene joint meetings on a regular basis, and will attend the annual one-day workshop for all pathway students.

Students will normally be registered in the school of their first supervisor. This may not be the school that processes your application.

Our new 'integrated' PhD model

Alongside the traditional approach to the PhD format, the school is now pleased to offer a new ‘integrated’ model which takes the form of a series of linked chapters, incorporating distinct but related studies and/or papers, instead of the standard final 80,000 word thesis. Discussions will be held with each student about the most appropriate format for their dissertation, taking into account their research subject and proposed methodology, and their own preferences.