Applications are invited for a new four-year DPhil programme based in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, which aims to train next-generation doctoral scientists in the practice of cutting edge chemical synthesis coupled with an in-depth appreciation of its application to biology and medicine.

The programme was designed in collaboration with ten international pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies and a government agency who have offered specific expertise to enhance the CDT's training. To ensure free exchange of information and expertise between all academic and industrial partners the CDT will adopt an intellectual property-free model consistent with its focus on basic science.

Students are admitted without being assigned to a specific research group and will be trained initially as a single cohort in all aspects of organic synthesis (for four months). They will subsequently undertake two fourteen-week research rotations in laboratories of their choosing before joining a specific group for a substantive three-year research project.

To enable significant and long term research goals to be tackled, research projects will be clustered into six broad fields:

• New Synthetic Methods
• 3D Templates for 'Lead-Like' Compounds
• Functional Probes for Epigenetics
• Next Generation Anti-Infectives
• Natural Product Chemistry
• Tools for Neuroscience

Application deadline is December 21, 2014

Further details:
http://www.nature.com