PhD Studentships
Training the next generation of structural scientists.
We know training the next generation is vital to advance science, for this reason we sponsor a number of PhD students every year as part of our charitable mission to advance science for the public benefit.
As a partner institute of the University of Cambridge we are able to supervise PhD students together with partner universities, and collaborating institutions including companies.
Current Sponsored Students
As part of our ongoing commitment to collaboration across academia and industry The CCDC sponsors a number of PhD students each year.
Topics range across the chemical and biochemical fields, and each PhD is co-supervised by a CCDC team member, a university and in many cases an industrial partner.
Join us at our annual Science Day to learn what PhD students currently sponsored by The CCDC are working on, as they present their progress.
Interested in applying for a PhD with the CCDC? Students and supervisors at academic or commercial research institutions can contact us here.
Emilia Prandini
Thesis title; Relating structure with surface properties of organic crystalline materials.
Collaboration with the Politecnico di Torino, Italy (Elena Simone).
Harry Nash
Thesis title; Evaluating the landscape of σ-hole intermolecular interactions.
Collaboration with Sheffield University (Lee Brammer, Grant Hill).
Katerina Vriza
Thesis title; Machine learning identification of co-crystal formation.
Collaboration with The University of Liverpool (Matthew Dyer and Vitaliy Kurlin).
Lawson Glasby
Thesis title; New knowledge and Tools for Topological Characterisation of the CSD Subset of Metal–organic Frameworks.
Collaboration with The University of Sheffield (Peyman Moghadam).
Mihaela Smilova
Thesis title; Small Molecule Fragment Hotspot Analyses to Drive Semi-Automated Design of Selective Molecules across a Protein Family.
Collaboration with The University of Oxford (Brian Marsden) and Ex Scientia (Anthony Bradley).
Benoit Baillif
Thesis title; Improving Ligand-Protein Affinity Prediction and Scoring Functions Using Proteochemometric Modelling and Deep Neural Networks.
Collaboration with The University of Cambridge (Andreas Bender).
Sam Meredith
Thesis title; Connecting Drug Discovery with Solid-State Formulation Design.
Collaboration with The University of Leeds (Colin Fishwick, Robert Hammond, Martin McPhillie), Pfizer (Klimentina Pencheva), and Syngenta (Neil George).
Nathan Henessy
Thesis title; Towards Product Control by Design: Studies of the Nucleation and Crystal Growth of L-Histidine.
Collaboration with The University of Leeds (Sven Schroeder, Beth Willneff).
Peter Curran
Thesis title; Exploration of the size and makeup of the minimal biologically relevant chemical space as a function of molecular complexity.
Collaboration with The University of Cambridge (David Spring) and UCB (Will Pitt).
Julia Gasol
Thesis title; From crystal to tablet – linking structure to function.
Collaboration with The University of Strathclyde (Iain Oswald and Daniel Markl).
Dori Gasparikova
Thesis title; From Fragment-screening to Fragment-growing – new strategies for drug discovery (Ref MoSMed20-10).
Collaboration with The University of Durham (Ehmke Pohl).
Jonathan McManus
Thesis title; Towards prediction of synthetically accessible organic molecular crystals.
Collaboration with The University of Liverpool (Vitaliy Kurlin and Andrew I. Cooper).
Daniel E. Widdowson
Thesis title; A rigorous identification of all metastable polymorphs for better and safer drugs.
Collaboration with The University of Liverpool (Vitaliy Kurlin and Andrew I. Cooper).
Jonathan Balasingham
Thesis title; AI-based exploration of crystal spaces to accelerate drug discovery.
Collaboration with The University of Liverpool (Viktor Zamaraev, Vitaliy Kurlin, and Andrew I. Cooper).
Marc Short
Thesis title; CatSD: Development of a Structural Database and Machine Learning Workflows for Catalyst Design.
Collaboration with The University of Leeds (Bao Nguyen and Charlotte Willians)
Cameron Wilson
Thesis title; The role of entropy in weakly-bound crystal structures.
Collaboration with The University of Edinburgh (Simon Parsons and Carole Morrison).
Sarah Wright
Thesis title; Is Conformational Flexibility a Problem for Crystallisation?
Collaboration with The University of Manchester (Aurora Cruz-Cabeza and Roger Davey).
About the Programme
Over 50 PhD students sponsored since 2000.
Here Jason Cole, Senior Research Fellow, explains more about the history and structure of CCDC’s PhD programme.
