MRC iCASE studentships: opportunities for businesses

The MRC industrial collaborative awards in science and engineering (iCASE) studentship scheme at The University of Manchester plays a key role in developing partnerships with business and enables students to benefit from a unique training experience.

The activity is funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) as part of its plans to drive innovation and collaboration with industry.

iCASE studentships at Manchester

The University receives an allocation of four 3.5-year studentships per year from MRC as part of the iCASE scheme.

Our studentships map onto the objectives outlined in the MRC strategic plan and focus on:

precision medicine
harnessing health data
materials and medicine

We want to identify companies (partners) that will work collaboratively with our academic supervisors as co-supervisors to support interdisciplinary projects that not only build on our studentships' strategic themes and strengths, but may help you gain new scientific insights relevant to your research and development operations.

Why become a partner?

• Work with graduates to achieve research of the highest quality, which may help inform your own research and development activities.
• Create effective links with The University of Manchester that could benefit your company now and in the future.
• Develop and nurture the careers of excellent doctoral researchers.
• Explore opportunities to open up alternative funding streams.

What's involved?

When you become a partner you are committing to:

• Involvement in the design of a 3.5-year long project with an academic supervisor.
• Involvement in the recruitment and selection of a student, with the academic supervisor.
• Providing the student with relevant training for a duration of three to six months through a placement in your business.
• Providing the student with opportunity to further develop skills and an industrial perspective to support the overall project.
• Effectively supporting the specific skills required for the project through relevant training, during the placement in particular, for example: training in bespoke and development instrumentation; use of mass spectrometry; or quantitative skills in statistical analysis.
• Providing the student with an introduction to your organisation, its working practices and policies.

Our partners will enhance and complement the training provided by the supervisory team as a whole.

Themes

Explore the themes we are looking to collaborate on with businesses like yours. https://www.bmh.manchester.ac.uk/study/research/mrc-icase/

• Precision medicine
• Harnessing health data
• Materials and medicine

Eligibility and costs

In order to be eligible, the MRC stipulates that companies with more than 250 employees are required to contribute a minimum of £1,400 per year to the University of Manchester as well as supplementing the student’s stipend by £2,500 per year.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (less than 250 employees) are exempt from making cash contributions to stipends and project costs.

All companies, regardless of size, should offer a constructive and welcoming student placement and cover additional expenses, such as the cost of travel and accommodation incurred by the student as a direct result of attendance at the premises of the company (no minimum amount).

You are also expected to pay for provision of in-kind contributions, e.g. coverage for all supervision, reagents/consumables and equipment use, etc.

How to apply

Expression of interests should include the name and email address of the proposed supervisor from the company, company name, size, outline of research mapped onto themes.

This should be emailed to mrcicase@manchester.ac.uk.

Key dates

Deadline for expressions of interest – Monday 16 March 2020
Identifying and pairing up with supervisor and companies – Tuesday 31 March 2020
Deadline for submission of proposals – Tuesday 12 May 2020
iCASE leadership team review of proposals – by Friday 22 May 2020
Advertising of proposals – Monday 25 May 2020
Deadline for student applications – Friday 19 June 2020
Supervisor and company to nominate preferred student – Thursday 9 July 2020
Formal student panel interviews held – w/c 20 July 2020