PhD in Engineering - Engineering Biofilms to 'Trap and Degrade' Microplastics and Heavy Metals from Water
About the Project
We are looking to recruit highly motivated, committed researchers who want to apply state-of-the-art engineering biology and science to deliver real-world solutions for a sustainable future.
Microplastics and heavy metals are now widespread contaminants across the world's water and wastewater systems, posing risks to both ecosystems and human health, and removing them remains a pressing challenge in water treatment. Engineering Biology is opening up a new route to tackling this problem. In this PhD you'll put that idea into practice by building living biofilms that can simultaneously trap and degrade both contaminants. The aim is to develop a biofilm-based platform that 'traps' contaminant types from the surrounding water, then either 'degrades' them in place or accumulates them for subsequent recovery.
A key challenge is that while engineered microorganisms routinely perform well in the lab, a central challenge is keeping them active, stable, and safely contained once conditions become less controlled such as when applied to real world applications. This project is built around solving exactly that challenge. Working in collaboration with Professor Ronan McCarthy at the University of Southampton, whose parallel PhD project will develop the engineered organisms themselves, you'll focus on the applied, scale-up side: establishing, characterising, and scaling engineered biofilms into working treatment systems. Critically, your strategy will be containment rather than release: you'll grow and use biofilms inside closed bioreactors, treating contaminated water in batch or flow-through mode, never introducing engineered organisms into the open environment.
Your experimental platform will centre on annular biofilm reactors, whose rotating design promotes mixing and sustained contact between contaminants and the biofilm, while allowing detailed characterisation of biofilm structure and function under controlled hydraulic conditions. You'll progress from optimising biofilm formation and extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) production, through to quantifying pollutant trapping and degradation efficiency across a range of shear stress, nutrient, and temperature regimes.
You'll validate your system in stages: starting with artificial water and wastewater spiked with known contaminant loads to establish baseline performance, then trialling different real water sources, such as river water and wastewater, each with its own native microbial community and variable chemistry. Non-modified control reactors will run alongside your engineered systems throughout, and you'll carefully quantify the release and environmental persistence of the engineered organisms to define safe operational limits. Your overall aim is a proof-of-concept for a contained, side-stream environmental biotechnology platform: a practical demonstration that engineered biofilms can trap, degrade, or remove water pollutants safely.
You'll gain hands-on training across biofilm process optimisation, bioreactor design and operation, and microbiology and environmental microbiology techniques used to monitor both the engineered biology and native microbial communities, alongside environmental contaminant analysis and biosafety and containment assessment for engineered organisms. These are increasingly sought-after skills as engineering biology moves from the lab bench toward real-world deployment.
At the University of Glasgow, you'll be based in the Advanced Research Centre, joining the wider Water and Environment Research Group and gaining access to our state-of-the-art facilities within a world-leading research environment tackling some of the most pressing challenges in sustainable, water solutions underpinned by biology. You'll also be part of a wider NERC-funded doctoral cohort, working closely with a partner project at Southampton and the broader EngBio4Env network of universities and industry partners.
This studentship is open to applicants who qualify for UK Home tuition fee status, including students from the Republic of Ireland, who are eligible for UK Home fee status under the Common Travel Area arrangement. Due to funding restrictions, applicants who do not meet Home fee criteria are not eligible to apply for this project.
Applicants should hold, or expect to achieve, a minimum of a 2:1 Honours degree, in a relevant subject area. Suitable backgrounds include Environmental Microbiology, Water Science, Water/Environmental/Civil/Chemical Engineering, as well as Molecular Biology, Microbiology, Biotechnology, Ecology, or Environmental Science more broadly. A Master’s degree while not essential, is desirable, and applicants must have the ability to work across disciplines and in collaboration with industry and academic partners.
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