World-Leading Scholarship in Mathematics and Earth and Environmental Sciences

The University of St Andrews is pleased to offer a full scholarship funded by St Leonard's Postgraduate College, to support an exceptional student undertaking doctoral research in the project 'The circulation of Alien Seas – Modelling ocean mixing and nutrient pathways on early earths.' This scholarship provides comprehensive funding for a PhD student to explore how Earth's ancient oceans circulated billions of years ago using mathematical modelling, climate physics, and machine learning. The project investigates how nutrients and energy moved through early oceans that were chemically and physically different from today, examining how these ocean-atmosphere systems responded to climate perturbations and supported early life. The research blends fluid dynamics, climate modelling, and geochemistry with modern data-driven machine learning approaches to understand early Earth habitability, biogeochemical cycles, and the emergence of life. Students will develop ocean circulation models, formulate advection-diffusion equations, apply machine learning techniques to ancient rock sequences, and compare predictions with geological proxies. The scholarship supports doctoral students at one of the UK's leading research-intensive universities, where over 88% of research is world-leading or internationally excellent according to REF 2021.