Are you an undergraduate or master’s degree student who would like to know more about the PhD application process and what studying a PhD is like? Then sign up to attend ‘Applying for a PhD’! The event will take place on 8th December from 13:00 to 14:00 and will give you the chance to hear 5 UCL researchers answer questions about how they applied for a PhD and what life as a PhD student is like. The speakers will be a mixture of current PhD students and PhD graduates sitting on a panel and will answer a variety of questions on topics such as PhD funding, finding a supervisor as well as how they found the transition from an undergraduate/masters degree to PhD.

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Panel of speakers:

Jiawei Li – 3^rd year PhD student in Liver and Digestive Medicine

Jiawei is intercalating a PhD research degree in the middle of her medical study. Her PhD project is funded by the UCL Grand Challenges, working to investigate the immune mechanism involved in the developmental programming of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. She is currently at her 3rd year of PhD, and will re-join the medical school upon completion. Over the three years, she has published several research articles and book chapters. Besides academic research, Jiawei is also actively involved in committee works. She has previously been involved in the UCL Leading Women Society, and mentored undergraduate students. Jiawei now sits on the committee of Obesity Action, a charity which promotes the awareness of obesity and obesity related conditions. She believes that the PhD has been a great learning experience, and would like to share her experience with other people.

Domenico Macri – 3^rd year PhD student in Chemical Engineering

Domenico Macri’ received both the bachelor degree and MSc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Calabria (Italy) in 2011 and 2014, respectively. His final year research project was based on the thermodynamic modelling and the experimental analysis of biomass gasification with supercritical water. He is currently a third year PhD student in chemical engineering at the University College London and his main research interests focus on the effect of temperature on the defluidization and sintering of industrial reactive powders.

Dr Anna Mazenod – Research Associate at UCL Institute of Education’s Department for Education, Practice and Society (completed Doctor in Education)

Dr Anna Mazenod is a Research Associate at UCL Institute of Education’s Department for Education, Practice and Society. Anna’s undergraduate degree was in Economics and Sociology, followed by an MA in applied Economics and Sociology. She then worked over eight years in the education sector as a manager and a policy practitioner, and completed her Doctor in Education (EdD) studies part-time at the Institute of Education. Following the award of her doctorate she has worked as a contract researcher in two different universities and taught on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Anna is currently working on the ‘Best Practice in Grouping Students’ project, a large scale mixed-methods research project. The project develops and tests best practice in how secondary school students are grouped in English and Mathematics, with a particular focus on improving academic attainment, self-confidence and experiences for low attaining students.

Dr Andrew Tosolini – Research Associate at Institute of Neurology (completed PhD in Anatomy)

Dr Andrew Tosolini is postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Neurology, UCL under the guidance of Professor Giampietro Schiavo. His current project focuses on the cell biology of motor neurons in health and disease. In particular, he is focused on understanding the mechanisms governing axonal transport as well as further understanding spinal cord circuitry in motor neuron disease/amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

He completed a Bachelor of Medical Science with Honours in Neuroscience (2010) and a PhD in Anatomy (2015) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. His PhD project focused on characterising the spatial organisation between skeletal muscle and the innervating motor neurons. This analysis served as a critical tool to virally deliver therapeutic genes for the treatment of spinal cord injury. In addition, he was awarded the Dean’s Merit List for his outstanding contribution to research as a postgraduate student from the Faculty of Medicine.

Simone Webb – 1^st year PhD student in Gender Studies

Simone Webb studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford, going immediately into a year long Master’s degree in Women’s Studies, also at Oxford. Her MSt dissertation was on feminist interpretations of the work of Anne Conway, a seventeenth-century philosopher. She then took a year’s break from academia and applied for PhDs. She’s now a first-year research student for the Gender Studies PhD at UCL, in the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry. Her project is on the use of genre and literary form in the texts of British seventeenth-century women philosophers – how the use of genre might relate to the philosophical content embodied in those texts, and further how it could relate to the gendered positions of their authors.