Wessex One Health BBSRC scholarship: Understanding how targeted interventions shape microbial ecology and antimicrobial drug resistance (AMR) transmission (2026)

What you get

PhD studentships cover four years of UK or International PhD fees and a tax free maintenance allowance (currently £20,780  in 2024-5) plus some research and travel costs.

Type of award

PhD scholarship

PhD project

Understanding how targeted interventions shape microbial ecology and antimicrobial drug resistance (AMR) transmission

Theme(s): Infection and Cellular Biology; Detection, Prevention and Intervention

Lead partner: University of Sussex 

Supervisor: Dr James Price:  j.price@bsms.ac.uk 

Joint partner: UKHSA         Supervisor: Jasmin Islam:  jasmin.islam@ukhsa.gov.uk 

Project Summary

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the most urgent global health threats, and healthcare plays a critical role in its emergence and spread. Hospital wastewater often contains high levels of resistant bacteria, resistance genes, and antimicrobial drug residues. Yet, we still know surprisingly little about biological mechanisms linking how we manage the AMR burden in wastewater to how resistance spreads in the wider environment.

Working in partnership between Brighton and Sussex Medical School and the UK Health Security Agency, you will describe the burden of AMR in hospital wastewater, investigate the mechanistic and ecological effects of intervention strategies, and identify how antibiotic residues influence microbial selection and gene transfer. Experimental and computational models will be used to understand how these biological changes could alter infection risks and AMR transmission within and beyond hospitals.

This PhD will apply Targeted Waste Stewardship, a novel bioscience-led intervention that separates and safely contains waste from two key patient groups:

1. Those colonised or infected with multidrug-resistant organisms, to prevent excretion of resistant bacteria into wastewater
2. Those receiving last-line antimicrobial drugs, to limit release of active drug residues into wastewater that create selective pressures driving AMR.

Both groups are likely major contributors to persistence and spread of AMR within hospitals and in connected wastewater environments. By interrupting these pathways, we aim to reduce environmental AMR contamination and downstream transmission risks.

This interdisciplinary PhD offers a unique opportunity to combine environmental microbiology and OneHealth approaches to tackle the real-world AMR problem. The results will advance our understanding of microbial ecology and AMR transmission in hospital systems and the wider environment, while informing more sustainable healthcare infection prevention practices. You will develop a broad skillset including infection biology, genomics, bioinformatics and systems modelling, which will prepare you for a future career in hospital wastewater.

Eligibility

Who we are looking for

You will have the ambition, motivation and scientific curiosity to research new approaches to combatting infectious diseases in the themes of:

• Detection, prevention and intervention
• Microbial evolution and drug resistance
• Understanding disease spread
• Infection and cellular biology. 

You will have or expect to have an MSc, and/or a first or upper second honours degree in a relevant subject. We welcome applications from graduates of all universities, and from candidates already in work, or returning after a career break.

Lab experience is desirable but not essential as all successful applicants will be trained in basic lab skills where applicable.

The Scholarships are open to both UK and International applicants.  However, international places are limited as 70% of each cohort must be Home students.  In addition, some of the partner laboratories have further nationality or residency requirements due to security clearance checks on their researchers.  Please contact the supervisors for details of any further requirements for this project.

Number of scholarships available

One for this project but 17 PhD studentships are available for October 2026  across the programme. 

Deadline

How to apply

Please apply by submitting an application form for a Wessex One Health scholarship and completing our EDI survey

You will find this project listed in Section 14 of the application form.

If you are invited for interview, you should contact the supervisors ahead of the interview, but you are welcome to contact them before applying to find out more about the project.

Contact us

For Sussex-specific enquiries contact pgr-scholarships@sussex.ac.uk

For information on this project, contact the Sussex supervisor: Dr James Price:  j.price@bsms.ac.uk 

For further information on the programme or application process, email WOH@surrey.ac.uk.

You might also be interested in

You can find out more about the Wessex One Health Programme here,

Timetable

The timetable is as follows:

Submission deadline: Midnight Friday 23 January 2026

Shortlisting: by 13 February 2026

Online interviews: Online, week beginning 3 March 2026