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The Plant and Crop Sciences group within the Lancaster Environment Centre is offering five fully-funded PhD studentships (3 x BBSRC i-CASE PhD studentships and 2 x HDC studentships ) in Agriculture and Food Security.

Each studentship will involve innovative research alongside commercial partners and/or on grower’s holdings, thereby providing a valuable industry-based training opportunity.

You will join a dynamic research grouping comprising seven academics, along with postdoctoral researchers and technical specialists, approximately 15 other PhD students and visiting scientists and students from overseas.

This group has considerable experience in delivering industrially-relevant Plant Science research; the Lancaster Environment Centre was ranked 3rd (out of 45) in its unit of assessment for research “Impact” in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework.  and maintains a high level of engagement in academic-industrial partnerships through, for example, the Centre for Global Eco-innovation. The Enterprise and Business Partnerships team within the Lancaster Environment Centre also provides unique business-related training to complement that provided by the commercial partner in each award.

PhD subject areas

Providing sufficient food for a growing world population, while improving the environmental sustainability of agriculture, represents a key challenge for the sector, and requires deploying a diverse range of technologies tuned to specific sectors. The PhDs will be focussed on the following areas of research.

Globally, pests and diseases cause major crop losses, thus the ability to detect their presence before symptoms are normally detected in crops represents an important opportunity for early intervention with biocidal treatments. The development of biomarkers for the detection of pests and diseases in the field offers the potential to reduce the application of biocides whilst also increasing crop yields. Increasingly though, seeds will be “primed” to respond to biotic and abiotic challenges so that the seedling is more resistant to pest and disease or environmental stress.

Protected cropping environments provide an opportunity to exclude pests and diseases, and their environment can be tightly regulated to maximise crop productivity. The development of a new generation of greenhouse claddings can bring the crop into production earlier by raising leaf (and possibly meristem) temperatures, but considerable work is needed to optimise claddings for specific crops. In Northern Europe, greenhouses typically maintain high atmospheric CO₂ concentrations to stimulate plant growth, but temperature regulation of the greenhouse results in CO₂ losses to the atmosphere. Rootzone CO2 enrichment may provide a more efficient, cost-effective way of stimulating crop growth.

Despite the increasing sophistication of horticultural production, broadscale arable agriculture will remain vulnerable to climatic fluctuations, causing crop losses. Drought stress is a major constraint on yields worldwide, and especially for Brazilian soya crops, but since there are varied physiological mechanisms limiting pod yield and causing pod abscission, there are many possibilities for chemical interventions to enhance yield.

Application process

We welcome enquiries and applications from well-qualified applicants who wish to join this thriving research community. To apply please read the instructions with each PhD at PhD Opportunities.Please indicate in your cover letter if you wish to be considered for more than one project.