Doctoral College

2. Upgrade to PhD

Your PGR support team will provide guidance on your upgrade.  The process you follow will depend on your start date. The upgrade policy linked below applies to all students in the HLS faculty. For students funded by SWBIO and BioMed please see separate guidance on the report content and submission date for the report (see section a and b).

 For full guidance please find the HLS PGR upgrade policy 2026/27 

BBSRC SWBIO

For students funded under the BBSRC SWBio Doctoral Training Partnership, the upgrade deadline will coincide with the successful completion of the first year of the DTP programme.
Reports submitted as part of the BBSRC DTP programme will preclude the need for preparing any further report. The student would then only be required to submit:

  1. Their SWBio RP1 & RP2 reports plus any available marksheets from their supervisors.
  2. Their SWBio scoping document and GANTT chart plan for the remainder of their PhD

Your PGR support team will send you an email with the information for your upgrade. 

For MRC GW4 BioMed DTP students, the upgrade process should be completed by 15 months of full-time registration with the upgrade report deadline at 12 months, pro-rata for part-time students. The report deadline within MyPGR will be 12months from the date you started your programme.