Life at Food and Nutritional Sciences

As a PhD student at Reading you will have the opportunity to join international leaders in Food research.

Your supervisor will be a leading academic in their field who will provide invaluable help and guidance to help you develop your research topic. All students also have a second supervisor who can provide additional support when required. There are first class facilities for all aspects of our research and we have excellent links with industry and other research centres throughout the world.

You will be given training in all the research techniques needed to get you started on your research project and introduced to the background scientific literature. In some cases our students may spend time with colleagues in a collaborating laboratory to learn new techniques.

All students join one of our three research groups – Food Bioprocessing Sciences, Food Microbial Sciences and the Nutrition Research group. We encourage students to present their work at conferences and all three research groups hold regular informal seminars where students gain experience in presenting their results before an interested and familiar audience.

In addition to your research studies you will attend sessions on generic skills training on a variety of topics run by Joint Faculty Graduate Skills Development Programme (GSDP).

The department has a truly international flavour with students coming from many countries of the world and is noted for its friendly atmosphere. You will have plenty of opportunities to meet and mix socially with your fellow students and members of staff are always on hand to discuss your work with you.