Induction

A PhD student lecture series is held every October for incoming students. The course is an integral part of the postgraduate programme: three weeks of lectures, interspersed with practical demonstrations, provide an overview of current research at the institute and introduce students to our state-of-the-art facilities. This is complemented by lectures on science and society, good scientific practice and science communication, and students are engaged in discussions through practical presentations and journal clubs.​

The 3rd year symposium is also part of the lecture series, allowing 3rd year students to show the incoming students and the institute as a whole what they have achieved in their time at the LMS.

Timeline

Following the induction month, there are numerous “checkpoints” to ensure that students research projects are progressing to plan.

These form useful times to discuss the progression of the project with your mentors as well as discuss any problems and discuss future career plans.

Professional Skills Development

All LMS Students are registered at Imperial College London and as such can make full use of the range of courses available at the Graduate School.

Here at the LMS we organise a Computational Biology Week, featuring practical workshops in Introduction to R (Basic statistics, manipulating and plotting data, loops, scripts); Micro array data processing; ChIP seq and RNA seq data analysis.

In addition we run a popular Presentation Skills Workshop; this 2-day course teaches practical skills and is a great start to the series of presentations you’ll be giving throughout your career in research and beyond.

Seminars & Conferences

Students present their work regularly to the LMS during their studies and also have the opportunity to present and discuss their work at group lab meetings. Students can expect to attend at least one national and one international conference during their studies, and are encouraged to go on educational exchanges with other institutions to learn new techniques and share ideas.

In their 3rd year, students organise their own symposium where they present their work and invite external speakers. This gives them valuable experience in organising a conference, and an opportunity to showcase what they have achieved as they near the end of their PhDs. It is scheduled in October every year, so that incoming students can see where they will be in three years’ time.

The LMS weekly seminar series and frequent ad hoc seminars are given by scientists from all over the world who are leaders in their field. Upcoming seminars can be found on the Seminar webpage.