About the DTP

The White Rose BBSRC DTP brings together the research of world-class molecular and cellular biosciences at the White Rose universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York. Our overarching theme is Mechanistic Biology and its Strategic Application – the study of basic, life-governing processes at all levels of organisation, from the atomic scale to the whole organism.

We carry out research in four key areas which map directly onto key BBSRC priority areas and the research strengths of the three partner institutions.  See more details of our Research Themes.

The students enrolled on our programme undertake an interdisciplinary training programme, as we believe this is essential in training students to prepare them for the challenges of modern bioscience.

Our mission is to train the bioscience researchers of the future, fully equipped to address and solve fundamental and strategic biological questions of national and global importance. We achieve this goal by offering research projects that encompass a wide range of model organisms and biological systems, physical methods, mathematical models and computational techniques applied to some of the most compelling biological questions.

The DTP brings together researchers from different disciplines, with supervisors who are biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians. We are exploiting recent developments in bioimaging, next generation sequencing, ‘omics technology and synthetic biology in our current research portfolio, through our established multi-disciplinary centres such as the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology, the Centre for Plant Sciences, the Centre for Novel Agricultural Projects (CNAP), the York Structural Biology Laboratory and the York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis.