PhD Pharmacology and Drug Discovery

Your research degree is bespoke at the University of Nottingham, and allows you to choose your own area of interest to research, under the title of your choosing.

Our Pharmacology and Drug Discovery grouping is made up of the following available PhD and MRes courses:

Our supervisors in the school are at the forefront of research in their fields. Utilising industry standard facilities, along with cutting edge equipment, and the guidance of our supervisors, you will advance the area of life sciences that interests you.

Your degree and research area is bespoke to you, however, here are some examples of the research we already conduct within the Pharmacology and Drug Discovery fields:

You can find our about our specific research in the course content section.

Post-graduate Community

Here in the School of Life Sciences we’re committed to supporting our students’ wellbeing to ensure that your experience studying with us is the best it can be. Whether you’re studying silk-weaving spiders or looking for new ways to fight infection, we want all of our students to feel part of our vibrant and diverse research community.

There are loads of opportunities to meet your fellow researchers and get involved with student activities and projects during your time at the University of Nottingham including:

PhD or MRes?

PhD programmes allow you to research a topic that interests them over the span of 3 to 4 years. You will be required to submit a thesis on your work at the end of your research period and take part in a viva voce examination. This is a fantastic opportunity to research an area that is unique to your interests, and help that field grow.

Masters by Research (MRes) programmes allow you to undertake a substantial amount of independent research while gaining 20 credits of transferable skills training over the span of 12 months. The programmes are flexible in nature and allow you to take some additional accredited taught credits, in consultation with your supervisor.

Defining my research area

If you have a particular research area you are interested in, you should start by emailing a relevant supervisor below and talking through your interests with them. You can see further details on our MRes and PhD titles below.

After you have done your research you can contact a relevant supervisor.

Pharmacology is concerned with the studying the effects of drugs on the body, as well as the effects of the body on the drugs.

We hold significant grant funding in these strategic areas (Wellcome funding PhD programme in Drug Discovery and Team Science) and are about to launch new BSc degree in Pharmacology, supported by colleagues from across a wide range of research areas an expertise (academia and industry).

We are equipped and staffed to help support any pharmacology research you may wish to undertake with us.

Molecular Pharmacology and Drug Discovery is concerned with the molecular basis of pharmacology and discovering new drugs and therapeutics to tackle today's pharmaceutical needs. We are equipped and staffed to help support any Molecular Pharmacology and Drug Discovery research you may wish to undertake with us.

We are part of a world leading centre of excellence (COMPARE) which has great reputation for collaboration in areas of drug discovery, as well as reputation for positive research culture/team science.

We are actively involved in a number of projects addressing the genetics of Alzheimer's disease. The success of these approaches is evidenced by the 90 plus papers published in the last five years.

We have run a number of LOAD, sEOAD, LBD and PCA samples on custom designed NeuroChip and are currently using this data to generate polygenic risk scores. We have access to GWAS, NGS and chip data from thousands of samples and this continues to be a rich resource to inform our future studies. We have also started to RNASeq from different brain regions in diseased and non-diseased tissue.

In the future expansion of these types of study will empower us to use a systems approach to understand the pathogenesis of AD.

Our aim is to utilise the advances being made in molecular genetics and cell biology to study the regulation of cell signalling pathways in healthy and diseased human tissues.

The major research themes within the group are: