Welcome to the Midlands+ Mental Health and Neuroscience PhD Programme for Healthcare Professionals
The Midlands and Oxford host the most innovative centres in mental health and neurosciences (MH&N), including digital mental health, clinical trials, neuroimaging, and epidemiology, serving an area of huge clinical need.
The Wellcome funded Midlands+ Mental Health & Neuroscience PhD Programme is led by the University of Nottingham, in collaboration with the universities of Birmingham, Leicester, Oxford, and Warwick, alongside our local NHS Trusts.
2027 Recruitment Now Open
Our 2027 recruitment round is now open.
Applicant Information Session
We will be hosting a virtual information session on Wednesday 18th November 12:00-13:00pm.
This information session will be conducted by our Programme Director and the Programme Manager. It is designed for Healthcare Professionals in the Midlands and Oxford regions who are interested in gaining a more in-depth understanding of the programme and its offerings.
The session will conclude with a dedicated question-and-answer segment, providing attendees the opportunity to address any queries they may have.
What does the Programme offer you?
The Midlands+ Mental Health and Neuroscience PhD Programme for Healthcare Professionals provides comprehensive support to enable you to undertake a high-quality clinical academic PhD while maintaining your connection to clinical practice.
Successful applicants will receive:
- A salary for the duration of the three-year PhD programme*
- Home (UK) rate tuition fees for three years
- Research costs to support delivery of your doctoral project
- Additional funding for training and development, enabling you to build the skills needed for a successful clinical academic career
- Travel and subsistence funding for research-related activities, including conferences, training opportunities and data collection where appropriate
- Protected funding for up to 0.2 WTE (one day per week) clinical practice, allowing you to maintain your professional registration, clinical skills and patient-facing experience throughout your PhD
Supporting your clinical academic career
We recognise the value of maintaining clinical expertise alongside research training. Participants are therefore permitted to undertake up to 0.2 WTE clinical work during their PhD. This clinical time is funded by the Programme and enables fellows to remain connected to practice while developing the skills required to become future clinical academic leaders.
Salary funding
* Salary funding is based on average NHS pay bands for the relevant professional groups, in line with the funding model used by Wellcome to support the Programme. We recognise that individual salaries may vary. Requests for funding above the average pay band may be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Beyond financial support
As a Midlands+ MHN DTP fellow, you will also benefit from:
- Access to a multidisciplinary community of clinical academic researchers
- Mentorship and supervision from experienced researchers and clinical academics
- Training opportunities across partner universities and NHS organisations
- Networking with fellow clinicians, researchers and lived-experience partners
- Support to develop a long-term clinical academic career beyond the PhD
This package is designed to enable talented healthcare professionals to focus on developing impactful research while remaining rooted in clinical practice.
The Programme
In a research environment that is dynamic, socially inclusive, and supportive, our Doctoral Training Programme (DTP) will develop an excellent, multidisciplinary, multi-professional researchers and an inter-sectoral research Midlands hub, facilitating adult learning, developing research and leadership skills, independent and critical thinking, and sharing of ideas, and teamwork.
Our PhD scholars will undertake excellent challenge-led research encompassing MH&N discovery science to translational and applied health research, covering the human lifespan and taking a bio-psycho-social approach, commensurate with the complex presentations, experiences, interventions, and impact of mental ill-health.
Our PhDs are funded by the generous funding of Wellcome in collaboration with our DTP universities.
Our Vision
Our vision, with inclusivity at its core, is to develop the next generation of multi-skilled research leaders amongst healthcare professionals from diverse cultural backgrounds and professions to conduct excellent research and advance knowledge in MH&N, paving the way to better patient, family, and carer care; community empowerment; and social development.
Our Aims
Develop the next generation of multidisciplinary clinical academics in mental health & neurosciences (MH&N)
Conduct and disseminate world-leading research
Create and sustain an ambitious Midlands-based, internationally connected, compassionate clinical-academic ecosystem, collaborating to address the key contemporary mental health challenges
Our Guiding Principles
High quality research
We will support our scholars to undertake high-quality research, that is going to answer the key questions the scholars seek to address. Through rigorous peer review and links with experts in the field nationally and internationally, we will ensure that the PhD projects are of the highest quality.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)
We are committed to Advance HE’s Guiding Principles of the Race Equality Charter and Athena Swan Charter, and strive to follow their Good Practice Initiatives. We strongly encourage applications from those groups who are underrepresented in different healthcare professions and those with lived experience of mental health difficulties.
Improvement and innovation through continuous evaluation
We have several years of experience running different DTPs, but we believe in self-improvement and we want to ensure that the PhD programme is tailored to the needs to our PhD scholars. Through regular consultation with our PhD scholars, supervisors, and our PPI members, we will learn about what is considered good practice and where we need to do better.
Interdisciplinarity and Team Science
Our scholars will be addressing in their research large and complex MH&N challenges, which requires teamwork and input from different professional groups and experts in different research methods. We strongly encourage interdisciplinarity. Scholars will have the opportunity to develop their skills and research projects with the input from experts from multiple disciplines, thereby enabling innovation within their own healthcare professional group. Our Team Science approach ensures that our PhD scholars get the benefits of working as part of a team, where the contributions of each member of the team are recognised.
Patient and Public Involvement (PPI)
PPI is core to our DTP and to all our scholars’ projects. PPI offers researchers:
- An improved understanding of what is important to patients and the public about a specific area/topic
- An alternative point of view
- An early indication of whether people would want to participate in the study (or how to improve the experience of participating in a study), and
- Guidance regarding dissemination of their research findings.
PPI will be expected at every stage of the scholar’s PhD journey, from the conceptualisation of the project to the dissemination plans. Scholars may also have a PPI member as part of their advisory team.