The School of Biosciences is one of the largest and strongest schools of its kind in the UK and provides an ideal environment for your postgraduate study with excellent career prospects.
The school has consistently achieved high ratings in independent assessments of teaching and research:
- Quality Assurance Agency rated our teaching as excellent (23/24)
- The most recent Research Assessment Exercise (2008) ranked the school top in the UK for research power in the areas of agriculture, veterinary and food sciences
The school undertakes research and teaching in the fundamental and applied sciences behind diverse issues such as global food security, bioenergy, the growth, development and reproduction of plants, animals and microbes, the environment and its protection and the production and preservation of agricultural and food commodities, including food structure and quality, nutrition and safety.
The school offers research degrees with the awards of MPhil, PhD, Integrated PhD and MRes. (Our MRes degrees usually include a taught element). The school offers an MRes Applied Bioinformatics, an MRes Developmental Biology, an MRes Advanced Genomic and Proteomic Sciences ,an MRes Industrial Physical Biochemistry an MRes Dietetics and an MRes Global Food Security. The school also offers MRes degrees in Sustainable Bioenergy and in Brewing Science, both delivered by distance learning and residential courses.
The school has five Divisions: Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Animal Sciences, Food Sciences, Nutritional Sciences, and Plant and Crop Sciences. In addition, the school has extensive national and international research links with companies and institutions working in the field of bioscience.
The school is located on the Sutton Bonington Campus, a self-contained site in the beautiful countryside of south Nottinghamshire, 10 miles south of University Park and the city of Nottingham. The campus is also close to two of the major East Midlands cities - Leicester and Derby. There are excellent road, rail and air links to the rest of the UK - East Midlands International Airport is only five miles away and London can be reached in 90 minutes from the East Midlands Parkway railway station.
Environmental Science students are currently based at University Park Campus.
Students have access to all facilities within The University of Nottingham and there are free and frequent shuttle buses to and from Sutton Bonington and University Park Campus. Commercial bus services also stop at Sutton Bonington Campus and on-site parking is available.
Current research
Division of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
The Division carries out research in:
- Agricultural Systems and Management
- Environmental Pollution (soil, water and atmosphere)
- Environmental and Ecosystem processes (including microbiology, geochemistry, soil science, atmospheric science and environmental modelling)
- Behavioural and applied ecology
Visit the Agriculture and Environmental Sciences website for further information.
Division of Animal Sciences
The Division’s primary research focus is on the physiology of reproduction in mammals, particularly in relation to improving or regulating fertility. We work mostly on domestic species, although we do occasionally study wild populations, and we relate our findings to human and animal medicine. We study the pituitary-ovarian-uterine axis, including oocyte development, folliculogenesis, ovulation, the formation of the corpus luteum, the maternal recognition of pregnancy, and early conceptus development. A recent successful bid to The Wellcome Trust Joint Infrastructure Fund has provided a £2m investment and we are currently upgrading our labs to facilitate work in proteomics (automated gel handling and sampling and QTOF-Mass Spectrometry). The Division’s Multidisciplinary Centre for Integrative Biology is undergoing a period of massive expansion with the successful awarding of £0.4m for a biopharmaceutical development project and £9.2m to establish the UK Centre for Plant Integrative Biology (CPIB), which will lead to the recruitment of 23 postdoctoral scientists and some 20 PhD students over the next five years.
Visit the Animal Sciences website for further information.
Division of Food Sciences
The division is an International Centre for both fundamental and industrial food, microbiological, brewing and biochemical teaching and research. Major research interests are: Flavour Science; Food Microbiology and Safety; Food Structure; and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) National Centre for Macromolecular Hydrodynamics.
The recently established Brewing Science Department is already regarded as a centre of excellence for brewing technologies and research, delivering education, qualifications and consultancy to meet the needs of the brewing industry.
Visit the Food Sciences website for further information.
Division of Nutritional Sciences
Nutritional Sciences is a very diverse division consisting of 17 members of academic staff whose interests range from molecular biology through to dietetics and public health. The overarching theme of research within the Division of Nutritional Sciences is the scientific understanding and improvement of nutrition for both humans and animals. A major linking theme is the understanding of nutrition at the molecular level but recent developments in the division have strengthened our research into public health nutrition.
The research with the Division of Nutritional Sciences encompasses a very broad range of topics with current projects in the following areas: Diet and Health; Fetal Programming; Gene-Nutrient Interactions; Control of Fat and Lean Deposition in Animals, and Meat; Food Allergy; Molecular Basis of Quality in Animal and Plant Products; Food Authentication; Public Health Nutrition; Ruminant Nutrition.
Visit the Nutritional Sciences website for further information.
Division of Plant and Crop Sciences
The internationally acclaimed Plant and Crop Sciences Division is one of the largest communities of plant scientists in the UK with over 150 members. Pioneering research is carried out on fundamental processes regulating plant growth, development and quality. The interactions between plants, their environment, and other organisms are studied using the model plants Arabidopsis Thaliana and tomato providing resources to the international scientific community which have fuelled recent impressive advances in our knowledge about plant processes and thus improvements in crop quality and agronomic performance. The Division has always adopted an integrated approach to research extending from studies at the molecular and biochemical level to physiological analysis of whole plants. This vision is enshrined in the new £8.5m Centre for Plant Integrative Biology (CPIB).
The Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre (NASC), one of two international stock centres, is the repository of over 550,000 lines. The scale of our research demands state of the art plant propagation facilities including transgenic greenhouses and over thirty controlled environment rooms.
Visit the Plant and Crop Sciences website for further information.
Contact:
Helen Wells, Postgraduate Manager
t: +44 (0)115 951 6015
e: helen.wells@nottingham.ac.uk
w: www.nottingham.ac.uk/biosciences