Dorothy Hodgkin Postgraduate Awards (DHPA) is a UK scheme to bring outstanding students from India, China, Hong Kong, South Africa, Brazil, Russia and the developing world to come and study for PhDs in top rated UK research facilities. The initiative was launched by the Prime Minister In November 2003.
What's new
Arrangements for 2011
It is expected that the final date for receipt of expressions of interest from potential private sector sponsors for 2011 scholarships will be in mid December 2010. The firm final date will be confirmed in due course as soon as it has been agreed with BIS, who will be coordinating the private sector proposals to participate in the scheme.
Arrangements for 2010
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Research Councils recognise the importance for the UK of being able to attract the best international research students, and have agreed to continue to run a core paired awarding exercise for up to a maximum of 45 new scholar starts in October 2010. This exercise will of course be contingent upon finding the necessary private sector sponsors and being able to match them to available but limited Research Council funding streams.
Four of the Research Councils – BBSRC, EPSRC, MRC and STFC – are participating this coming year, so will be potentially sponsoring core paired scholarships in the areas of biotechnology and biological sciences, engineering and the physical sciences, medical sciences, and astronomy, particle physics, space science and nuclear physics. We will not provide scholarships in the arts, humanities, social, economic, or environmental sciences. Individual research councils will be responsible for agreeing which projects they wish to fund from their available resources, and they may not be able to support all the suggested company projects if demand is higher than the supply of training funds.
The matching of proposed PhD projects to research council remits and financial resources will take place early in the New Year, and grant letters to university research organisations are expected be sent out by EPSRC in April 2010. All current and forthcoming DHPA training grants will continue to be managed by EPSRC, acting on behalf of BIS and the participating Research Councils.
Experience has shown that most proposed awards from core private sector sponsors may be already strongly associated by them with particular research organisations, departments and supervisors, so research councils will be operating an explicit light-touch cross-check to ensure that scholarships are allocated to their most highly rated research organisations. Note there is no applications route operating for university research organisations because the determinant factor is the private sector partner’s choice of location for the awards at academic research laboratories.
Grants are for a fixed term of four years from October each year to provide flexibility for a three to four year PhD on average throughout their lifetime. The grant letter provides a net figure of £45,000 per scholarship for the particular research council contribution, to match the mandatory company contribution of £45,000. Each agreed project must fall within the scientific remit of the research council providing the public funds for each scholarship.
The training grant letter for DHPA is managed by the university itself, and does not directly confer resources to individual scholar supervisors. Accordingly, all prospective academic supervisors who are actively collaborating with potential business partners for DHPA scholarships starting in October 2010 should co-ordinate their award expectations with the designated DHPA administration contact at their research organisation. However, it is entirely the responsibility of the research organisations working with their private sector partners to ensure that the necessary 50% funding for each new scholarship recruited to any 2010 training grants is collected from the business to the university: EPSRC (and the other research councils) will not participate in any way in this financial transaction.
Data Collection for Dorothy Hodgkin Postgraduate Awards
We have added a new page to the Dorothy Hodgkin website which summarises all the data which is collected for DHPAs. If you are a DHPA student or a university DHPA contact, please read through this page so that you are aware of all the data that needs to be provided, who provides this data, and when this data should be submitted. Recently completion rates for this data have been quite low, so we would encourage you to read through this page and then submit the data required. Your cooperation is very much appreciated!
DHPA Report 2010
This review evaluates the Dorothy Hodgkin Postgraduate Award scheme performance against the original objectives and assesses how well the scheme is meeting the requirements of students, alumni, PhD supervisors and corporate sponsors.
A copy of the report is available here 
DHPA Report 2007
At the end of 2006 a survey was conducted canvassing the opinions of all the stakeholders of the DHPA scheme - the students, the supervisors, the university DHPA contacts, the sponsoring companies and the sponsoring research councils. They commented on how successful they thought the scheme had been, as well as the quality of the training and the quality of the students, and also made some suggestions as to how to take the scheme forward. This information, combined with student data entered through the Je-S online portal and a series of case studies, was used to write a report. You can view this report here .
Further Information:
Students wanting to apply for DHPA funding should contact individual recipient universities, using the contact points provided, rather than sending applications to EPSRC or RCUK.
For general enquiries about DHPAs, please contact: studentships@epsrc.ac.uk