PhD Opportunities in Chemical Biology in United Kingdom

The University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom, is offering a full-time PhD studentship in machine learning-guided engineering of next-generation cancer therapeutics, starting 1 October 2027. Supervised by Dr Amit Sachdeva, the interdisciplinary project will develop small antibody fragments designed to penetrate solid tumours more effectively than conventional full-length antibodies. The research combines machine learning-guided protein design with experimental chemical biology, synthe...

The University of East Anglia is offering a full-time, three-year PhD studentship in N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC)-stabilised gold nanoclusters for intracellular catalysis, supervised by Dr Sophie Thomas. The project is based in Norwich, England, and starts on 1 October 2027. The research will develop water-soluble NHC ligands and atomically precise gold nanoclusters with tunable stability, solubility, catalytic activity, size, and surface properties. It will investigate how ligand structure affe...

The University of Cambridge is inviting applications for PhD research opportunities in synthetic chemistry within the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. Seven internationally leading research groups offer projects spanning reaction discovery, catalysis, molecular design, chemical biology, supramolecular chemistry, and computation. The research community focuses on inventing new reactions, discovering catalysts, understanding molecular behaviour, and developing tools with applications in biolo...

[4-year fully funded Norwich Research Park Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership PhD studentship including payment of tuition fees, a stipend for living expenses at the 2026/27 rate of £21,805, and a Research Training Support Grant of £5,000 per year.] This fully funded PhD studentship at the University of East Anglia is hosted within the Norwich Research Park Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership and focuses on chemical biology approaches to tackling antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The p...

PhD opportunity at Cardiff University in chemical biology , medicinal chemistry , and drug discovery , focused on developing selective chemical probes for TFEB/TFE3. The project aims to uncover the distinct roles of TFEB and TFE3 in lysosomal gene regulation and to study the consequences of inhibiting these transcription factors. The research combines biochemical and cellular assay development, high-throughput screening, computational chemistry, and structure-guided medicinal chemistry to discov...

PhD opportunity at the University of Birmingham in chemical biology , epigenetics , genome stability , and the study of biomolecular mechanisms . The project is co-led by Martin Higgs and Andrew Wilson and focuses on creating new substrate-specific tools to detect lysine methylation and using them to investigate the dynamics of non-histone methylation . This is a fully funded 3-year PhD supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Funding is available for UK fees and stipend only , so applicants should no...

Two fully funded PhD studentships are open in the group of Professor Glenn Burley at the University of Strathclyde, in partnership with GSK. These projects sit at the interface of chemistry and biology and focus on nucleic acid-based therapeutics. Project 1: Next-generation RNA-PROTACs — a direct-to-biology discovery platform for the targeted degradation of RNA-binding proteins. The project will develop RNA-PROTACs assembled and assayed in cells, combining therapeutic oligonucleotide synthesis, ...

PhD Studentship at the University of Manchester in Microbiology and Chemical Biology focused on how Mycobacterium tuberculosis uses nutrients and how nutrient transport affects pathogen biology. This interdisciplinary project will combine microbiology, genetic, biochemical, and analytical methods to investigate nutrient utilisation in M. tuberculosis and to understand how disrupting nutrient transport changes survival and adaptation in the human host. The work is based at the Manchester Institut...

Fully funded PhD opportunity at the University of Edinburgh in Chemical Biology and Immunology . This 4-year PhD project sits at the interface of chemical biology, cancer research, and immune cell biology. The research will investigate how the immune system recognises cells and how cancer cells evade detection through a newly identified “Don’t-Eat-Me” signal protein that helps cells avoid phagocytosis. The successful candidate will use mRNA display to screen very large peptide libraries and will...