Berlin | Scholarship for Nigerians and Africans

The Berlin Summer School of Social Science International Program 2011, Germany

The “Berlin Summer School in Social Sciences – Linking Theory and Empirical Research” seeks to promote young researchers by strengthening their methodological understanding in linking theory and empirical research.
The summer school is designed for PhD candidates who have already begun planning their doctoral projects in detail or are currently working on them. All applicants should already be enrolled in the PhD studies and should be pursuing doctoral dissertations that take the themes of the Berlin Summer School into consideration. For applicants in 5-year doctoral programs, we would generally recommend applying no earlier than the 2nd year of studies.
We will select thirty international participants based on academic achievement and motivation as reflected in a CV and motivation statement.

Scholarship Application Deadline: 15 May 2011

Further Scholarship Information and Application

Berlin Graduate School International Doctoral Program in Social Sciences 2011

Research proposals should relate to the comparative analysis of the following research areas and topics. A combination of the following areas and topics is welcome:

Inclusion
-social inequality and well-being
-social protest and social conflict
-migration and cultural diversity
-the clash and the management of collective identities

Democracy
-performance of mature and young democracies
-processes of democratization, and the resilience of autocracy
-multilevel and multinational policy
-political institutions, political conflict, and the welfare state

Knowledge
-scientific knowledge in processes of policy-making
-the impact of science and religion on processes of inclusion and democratization
-communicating knowledge in public spheres
-the governance of science

Admission is based on academic excellence and is open to students with a Master’s degree or equivalent in the social sciences (sociology, political science and neighbouring disciplines). We expect a high-level knowledge of current theoretical debates in the social sciences and in-depth knowledge of either quantitative or qualitative techniques of social research as well as a commitment to empirical research. English proficiency at an academic level is assumed.

Doctoral researchers are awarded scholarships of up to 1200€/month for a maximum of 36 months, contingent on the successful completion of each year. Applicants with alternative funding are welcome; we provide incentives for applications for external funding.

Scholarship Application Deadline: January 3 to February 16, 2011.

Further Scholarship Information and Information

PhD Scholarship of Biosciences BBSRC CASE Award: Exploiting Next-Generation Sequencing Data for Measurement of Biological Phenomena, UK

Based in the School of Biosciences and offered in collaboration with the LGC, this BBSRC CASE award will look at next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, which have the potential to be used for measurement of a wide range of biological, environmental, and toxicological phenomena. The project will involve testing and validating NGS methods, including consistency between alternative methods (e.g. Illumina, 454, Quantitative PCR), accuracy, dynamic range for optimal accuracy, the robustness of technologies to increasingly complex mixtures of test material, variations in DNA library preparation protocols, inherent biases of each method and ability to reproduce measurements.

As part of the award you will have access to standard reference biological materials (well-characterised mixtures of two or more bacterial strains, for example) as well as Illumina (via Exeter) and 454 (via LGC) NGS platforms. You will also have access to more established analytical methods such as quantitative PCR. The first step will be to devise a series of metrics of reproducibility and bias. As well as classical statistical approaches such as linear regression, the project will also make use of bioinformatics approaches for tasks such as quality-filtering and mapping reads against reference sequences.

You will spend at least 6 months seconded to LGC’s laboratories in Teddington and it is also likely that you will have the opportunity to spend some time at one of LGC’s sites abroad (e.g. the Berlin laboratories where the 454 instrument is based).

Application deadline: 13th August 2010