The QUARTILES Doctoral Landscape Award combines research centres of excellence in biological sciences and geosciences at the University of Aberdeen and Queen’s University Belfast, collaborating with over 50 partners from across government, industry, NGO and policy development. Find out more about our partner schools below:
University of Aberdeen, School of Biological Sciences
University of Aberdeen, School of Geosciences
Queen’s University Belfast, School of Biological Sciences
Queen’s University Belfast, School of Natural and Built Environment
Through this partnership we have identified a range of priority PhD projects and have developed a training curriculum that includes internship opportunities to ensure our graduates are well positioned as future research leaders and innovators across government, industry, NGOs and academia; equipping students with the skills, vision and experience essential to lead, communicate and translate innovative interdisciplinary research that meets the complex environmental grand challenges posed by climate change, biodiversity loss and sustainability.
What are environmental grand challenges?
Environmental and societal grand challenges can include but are not limited to topics like: mitigating and buffering the effects of long term environmental change, maintaining ecosystems services, ensuring food and water security, enhancing energy efficiency, managing the sustainable use of natural resources, promoting sustainable agriculture, controlling pollution, conserving habitats, protecting species to address the biodiversity crisis, managing invasive and pest species, minimising impacts of urbanisation, optimising carbon sequestration, controlling the emergence and spread of disease, transitioning to sustainable energy systems and restoring degraded habitats and ecosystems.
Effective environmental management provides frameworks, strategies, policies and practises pivotal for addressing and managing these challenges.
What we offer?
QUARTILES offers 19 fully funded PhD studentships annually, with the first cohort of students commencing their studies in early October 2025. We anticipate QUARTILES will recruit 5 cohorts in total.
Studentships are directly funded. This means we will recruit a student to each of the 19 projects we advertise.
Studentships are open to UK and Overseas (EU and non-EU) applicants, however, international places are capped at 30% of the annual cohort and are consequently very competitive.
Students will be hosted at one of our 4 partner schools, at either the University of Aberdeen or Queen’s University Belfast. All students will have a core supervisory team with members based at both institutions, giving you the unique opportunity to access facilities, resources and training at both sites.
Please refer to the UKRI website, Annex B of the UKRI Training Grant Terms and Conditions and our funding and eligibility page for full eligibility criteria.
