20 PhD studentships with a strong mathematical backgraound UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

University of Edinburgh is inviting applications for PhD positions. Applicants will work on the research project “Towards a comprehensive biophysical model of gene regulation in dendritic cells” under the supervisions of Dr Nacho Molina. UK/EU and international applicants can apply for this position. UK students can receive a full studentship award which will cover both tuition fees and living costs. Application deadline is 16 January, 2015.

Study Subject(s): Applicants will work on the research project “Towards a comprehensive biophysical model of gene regulation in dendritic cells” under the supervisions of Dr Nacho Molina.
Course Level: This position is for pursuing PhD at University of Edinburgh, UK
Scholarship Provider: University of Edinburgh, UK
Scholarship can be taken at: UK

Eligibility: The ideal candidate should have a strong mathematical background, experience in bioinformatics and good programming skills.

Scholarship Open for International Students: UK/EU and international applicants can apply for this position.

University of Edinburgh
PhD Position

Scholarship Description: An attractive system to model genome-wide regulation of transcription and chromatin dynamics are the dendritic cells (DCs), responsible for the initiation and regulation of immune responses. DCs react to pathogen exposure by triggering regulatory programs that activate or repress thousands of genes during a period of 24h. Recently, exciting new efforts have been able to acquire a vast amount of data improving our understanding of this process. Upon stimulation, time course of ChIP-seq experiments have been able to measure DNA-protein interaction dynamics of 25 TFs and the RNA polymerase II as well as three histone modifications (Garber et al. 2012). Moreover, metabolic labelling of RNA has uncovered basic principles of RNA production and degradation dynamics by measuring over time the accumulation of newly synthesized RNA and the degradation of old RNA (Rabani et al. 2011). These novel experimental results pose a challenging task: to develop a biophysical model of transcriptional regulation able to integrate all these data in a coherent mathematical framework. The main goal of this PhD project will be to develop a model able to: i) explain the temporal pattern of RNA synthesis from the dynamics of TFs and histone modifications; and, ii) predict the outcome of perturbation experiment through RNAi (Amit et al. 2009).

Number of award(s):
UK and other EU applicants-There are approximately 20 PhD studentships per year to applicants from the UK and other EU countries.
Overseas (non-EU) applicants-A limited number of partly or fully-funded scholarships may be available through the School.

Duration of award(s): Not Known

What does it cover? UK students can receive a full studentship award which will cover both tuition fees and living costs. Non-UK resident EU students are usually only eligible for the fee component of these awards.

Selection Criteria: All studentships are awarded competitively.

Notification: Not Known

How to Apply: The mode of applying is online.http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/biology/postgraduate/pgr/how-to-apply

Scholarship Application Deadline: The application deadline is 16 January, 2015.