All students will participate in a two-week induction. The first week will be undertaken with the ILESLA cohort in Oxford and will include a visit to meet researchers, including their GSK career mentor, at GSK’s Stevenage R&D facility. The second week will be undertaken alongside other students in the student’s host institution (i.e. students doing their primary PhD project in Cambridge will join the induction of the Cambridge students). 

This approach will establish lasting connections across and within the student cohorts and across the three academic partners, introduce the academic requirements of doctoral research and enable students to discover resources available to support research and wellbeing at each institution. 

Students will develop a personal training plan recognising their diverse backgrounds across mathematics, computational skills, and biology with support from a TTPS Director, updated throughout their studies in consultation with their supervisory team. Students will be allocated a student mentor in their first year to provide advice as they start their studies.

Students will participate in a 16-week cohort-based training programme. Technical skills: The first nine weeks will be structured into 2-3 week training blocks focused on core skills, followed by courses focusing on advanced technical skills needed in data-driven pharmaceutical research. 

All modules will be delivered in Oxford and are co-developed and taught by world-leading researchers from the universities and GSK, embedding industrial relevance into all teaching.

All modules will involve experiential and project-based learning and students will be supported to become reflective learners through self-assessment, peer review and formative feedback. Certain courses are taught in conjunction with with other programmes, enabling you to interact with students from other disciplines.

Your teaching is likely to follow a structure similar to this:

Core Academic Skills (Term 1)

Research software engineering (3 weeks). Code repositories, version control, IDEs, automated test driven development, continuous integration, software development & design, object-oriented analysis and design, algorithms and data structures, software usability and dissemination.

Molecules, cells, and systems and experimental bioscience for physical scientists (3 weeks) Fundamental concepts in molecular and cellular biology and genetics, and the structural and functional aspects of biological systems.

Foundational mathematics, data analysis and modelling for biologists (3 Weeks) Covering key mathematical concepts in continuous and discrete mathematics, and stochastic and deterministic approaches required in modelling biological systems

Mathematical, computational, statistical and data engineering methods for pharmaceutical research (3 weeks) Non-spatial mathematical modelling in biology; numerical methods; data visualisation, statistics and machine learning; data management, storage, curation.

Advanced Computational and Data Driven Training (Term 2)

Structure-based drug discovery (2 weeks) Prediction and exploration of macromolecular protein structure: structure determination, visualisation, classification and validation; structure prediction and folding; protein-protein, protein-ligand and protein-drug interactions; small molecule and biologics drug discovery. 

Physiological modelling underpinning pharmaceutical research (2 weeks) Theoretical modelling of complex biological systems to underpin pharmaceutical research (including PKPD and QSP), focusing on model parameterisation and ML techniques. 

Image analysis and diagnostic development in pharmaceutical research (2 weeks). Integrating core image analysis techniques with AI/ML for multimodal biological data ranging from low-level vision, through mid-level automated understanding of data, to high-level AI-driven applications. 

Professional development: The TTPS technical skills programme will be integrated with professional skills development workshops (e.g. scientific writing, presentation skills, responsible research, ethics), and research into potential rotation projects. Students will develop a career development plan in consultation with their Director and GSK mentor. The core and advanced training blocks will be separated by a ‘Life Skills’ week focused on project management, open research, responsible research and innovation, ethics, reproducibility, research integrity, IP, wellbeing and positive research culture, preparing students for the transition into rotation projects. 

Rotation Projects: In the second half of Year 1, all students will conduct two 11-week rotation projects, one of which may be expanded to become the student’s doctoral project. 

At least one project must be undertaken in the student’s host institution. To promote cross-institution collaboration students will be free to choose a rotation in one of the two other institutions. However your main PhD project must be undertaken at your host institution..

Rotations will typically be chosen from a booklet of projects offered that year. All projects will be jointly devised and supervised by an academic and a GSK supervisor. Supervisor and project eligibility will be overseen by the management committee ensuring projects are within BBSRC remit, address GSK strategic priorities and have suitable potential, and supervisors have appropriate expertise, training, time and resources.

Projects will be presented to the students by the academic and industrial supervisor teams during term 1. Students will give short project presentations to their cohort eight weeks into each rotation, and each project will be written up and assessed, with the assessments reviewed by the Programme Directors.

Group project work (Sandpit and long-format team project): During the rotation projects students will also work collaboratively on a long-format, team-based project involving extended data analysis of research data sets provided by the GSK- Academic collaborative programmes, and mentored by early career researchers within those projects. 

The team projects will kick off with a one-week, in-person Project Sandpit. Teams will invest half a day/week in the project and will meet with their mentors regularly to review progress (online). They will present a mid-term report to their cohort, with a one week (in-person) sprint, leading into the final presentation and report. These projects will connect students with the broader GSK-academic research ecosystem across the partner institutions.

Over the summer of year 1, students will take ownership of their chosen doctoral project and develop grant writing skills by co-designing and writing a research proposal with their supervisory team, submitted along with an updated personal training plan. This will be assessed in a viva to provide formative feedback on the aims, training needs and project feasibility. This process will complete by the start of Year 2, allowing students to incorporate feedback from the start of the PhD project. 

Project selection will be managed by the Directorate to balance supervisor commitments and ensure appropriate supervisory teams. Further milestone assessments will be undertaken during years 2 and 3. Students and supervisory teams will report on progress quarterly, in reports reviewed by the departmental Director of Graduate Studies, TTPS academic mentor and a Director in their host institution. 

Students will typically follow the extensive professional development programmes in their host institutions, but we will continue to bring students together as a cohort for workshops in key areas including sustainable research practice and an Annual Symposium (hosted by GSK). 

Students will be supported to further develop their skills through courses available through the Doctoral Landscape Training Network.

Students will be supported to take ownership of the transition into the next stage of their career through engagement with a broad range of activities. 

Each student will have a career mentor from GSK to help them review and update their career development plan. Each of the host partners provides a comprehensive professional skills programme that provides training in: communication, including outreach; teaching and digital accessibility (years 1&2); preparing to write a thesis (year 3); preparing for the viva (year 4); CV writing and interview skills (year 3/4). 

Where a more specialised career development plan course is offered by one of the hosting partners, such as enterprise skills at Oxford, or the Future Worlds programme at Southampton, it will be made available to all students on the programme. 

With the Careers Services in the three universities, we will run an annual Careers in Pharma event, with institutions rotating as hosts. After graduation, students will remain connected through our extensive alumni networks. 

Internships: All students will undertake a 3-month internship at GSK to gain work experience in a commercial context, with students encouraged to undertake these in groups to foster cohort cohesion. All associated accommodation and travel costs will be met by GSK.