- Vacancy Reference Number
- MND Scotland PhD Studentship 2024
- Closing Date
- 31 Oct 2024
- Salary
- grant award up to £100,000
- Duration
- 3 years
MND Scotland and LifeArc are partnering to fund one, three year, PhD studentship to start in 2025 to increase research into improving MND diagnosis or identifying biomarkers for use in MND research or care.
MND is a progressive, life-shortening illness, which arises from the death of motor neurons. The subsequent weakening of muscles leads to a loss of ability to walk, talk, eat and, eventually, breathe. In the UK, 1 in 300 people will die from MND and there is currently no cure or effective disease modifying treatment available. Average life expectancy following diagnosis is just 18 months. Diagnosis is challenging, often taking over a year, and there is an urgent need for unique biomarkers and new diagnostic tools to not only help speed up this process, but also provide improved monitoring of disease progression in clinical trials.
MND Scotland is committed to ‘making time count’ for people affected by MND and our core strategic goals include working in partnership to enable transformation in MND research and investing in ground-breaking research to change the future for people with MND. Our PhD studentships are designed to encourage young science graduates within the UK to embark on a research career in MND.
As a self-funded medical research charity, one of LifeArc’s aims is to help young researchers become established as scientists and as part of that to provide them with valuable insights into industry to advance their future career options. MND is one of LifeArc’s focus areas for research, supporting the development of new approaches to disease modifying interventions as well as new diagnostic tools and patient assisting devices.
As part of this joint studentship the student will spend placement periods within LifeArc laboratories, accessing industry leading facilities and technologies whilst embedded in a MND translational research environment. These placements would complement the capabilities in the home academic lab and would be managed around the exact needs of the PhD project.
For this MND Scotland-LifeArc jointly funded studentship, we welcome applications from all disciplines (including, but not limited to, laboratory-based, translational and clinical research, engineering, machine learning, and data-based science) but are specifically inviting projects aimed at improving the diagnosis pathway for MND or identifying biomarkers for use in MND research or care. This could include fluid-based biomarkers detected in the periphery, imaging-based biomarkers e.g. detection by MRI, PET or CT, electrophysiology-based biomarkers like EMG or digital biomarkers like, for example speech-detection patterns.
Further Information
More information can be found at: https://mndscotland.org.uk/phd-studentships-2024/
Deadline: 31 October 2024
Contact Details
research@mndscotland.org.uk
