Imperial College London
South Kensington, London, UK
Full-time or Part-time Study

A one year (full-time) or two year (part time) multidisciplinary Masters in Research (MRes) course that equips students with the language, knowledge and skills to enable them to tackle problems lying at the plant-physical science interface. Training is provided by world renowned academic and industrial scientists in the plant and chemical biology fields. The course consists of an 8 month multidisciplinary research project, specialist lectures, transferable skills courses, interactive workshops, tutorials, journal clubs and seminars.

Why Plant Chemical Biology?
In the last half-century there have been remarkable advances in our knowledge of the chemistry of biological systems. However, a quantitative understanding of the molecular mechanisms taking place is still in its infancy. Without such knowledge, we cannot be said to truly understand how these systems operate and interact with their surroundings.

The food, fibre and fuel requirements of our ever-increasing population are some of the major challenges facing current society. There is therefore a clear need for innovation and technology to increase crop productivity in a sustainable way. Key targets include increasing photosynthetic efficiency, reducing losses caused by pests and diseases, enhancing food safety and quality for better nutrition, minimising waste throughout the food supply chain, and improving the processing of biomass materials for fuels and other plant derived chemicals and materials.

Chemical Biology through physical science innovation (in e.g. chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering) is able to develop novel tools and technologies to tackle biological problems on a molecular level. It is a discipline that is perfectly poised to address the next great challenges in the agri-sciences, in the postgenomic area and to understand how chemical and biological space are interacting and influencing each other.

Tuition fees and scholarships
Information on tuition fees can be found here.

There are opportunities to gain scholarships in a competitive fashion. These will provide funding towards tuition fees and/or living expenses and will be granted on the basis of academic merit and excellence of the applicant. All students who wish to be considered for this scholarship should apply by submitting a copy of their CV by email to Dr Laura Barter in addition to submitting a College Postgraduate Application Form.

Applicants for the MRes in Plant Chemical Biology may also be eligible for the Basil Furneaux Memorial Fund.

You can search for all available scholarships using our tool.

How To Apply

Please apply by completing and submiting the online Imperial College Postgraduate application form. The program you should select when completing the online application is under ‘Department of Chemistry’ and the course name is ‘MRes in Plant Chemical Biology: Multidisciplinary Research for Next Generation Agri-Sciences’.

All Postgraduate applications must be submitted online, please click here to apply.

Contacts
For further details of the course please consult the links to the documents above. If these do not answer your query, please email the MRes chemistry admins at chemres@imperial.ac.uk

The course directors for this MRes are Dr Rudiger Woscholski and Dr Laura Barter.