Venture Science Doctorate: a 3-year, fully-funded, NEW PhD program

The Venture Science Doctorate (VSD) is the world’s first venture creation focused PhD program.

The Venture Science Doctorate.

Today’s Climate and Health challenges require speed, scale and skills like never before. Traditional PhD programs are not designed for these challenges, and they often exclude under-represented groups, and driven, commercially-minded visionaries. This matters because PhD programs shape tomorrow's deeptech workforce and our capacity to solve important problems.

The Venture Science Doctorate is an alternative.

We are setting out to materially alter and broaden the definition of “scientist”.

The VSD, run by Deep Science Ventures, is the world’s first 3 year, fully-accredited PhD run in labs at the world’s best universities. It’s awarded by Woolf University: a globally recognized, decentralised institution widening access to higher education. Focus exclusively on solving global challenges in Health and Climate through science as the basis for new science companies.

The VSD is backed by:

• Schmidt Futures - the pioneering global philanthropic facility for science, founded by the former CEO of Google - Eric Schmidt
• InnovateUK - the UK’s primary government innovation agency
• The global technology organisation VDE, The Mayo Clinic, The University of Edinburgh and the Henry Royce Institute - a national network of leading labs from across the UK, which include Imperial College, Oxford University and the University of Manchester among many others.

What is the most important question in your sector? Learn to design your own research project from first-principles. Search the literature for global impact, not just knowledge. Meet some of the world’s most entrepreneurial supervisors. Hone intellectual freedom, grow networks and raise investment to solve the world’s hardest problems.

You can read more about the program itself on the dedicated VSD site, here.

Requirements

• You're impact-driven and have demonstrated interest in investigating or solving large-scale societal problems. This could be industrial research, hackathons or other problem-based competitions, or a project that you took beyond what was expected in class;
• You want to build a company and lead a team that will make a huge positive impact using advanced research and technology;
  
• Your sense of urgency means you've considered multiple ways to generate positive human and/or planetary outcomes in the next 1-5 years;
  
• You're naturally curious and can share examples of past experience learning how things work;
  
• You're determined enough to spend 1 month, during the application process, finding an optimal approach to a societal problem, using Deep Science Venture's scoping ideation methodology;
  
• You have an undergraduate degree related to science, innovation or design-thinking, or professional research experience.

Benefits

1. Learn how to conduct deeptech superforecasting, like Program Managers at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the first-shapers of the internet, Siri and mRNA vaccines.
   
2. Become capable of launching a sector-scale deeptech company, or more than one - like Mission Zero, Xonai, Antiverse and other founders we trained.
   
3. Join a virtual community of >200 science entrepreneurs, in over 24 countries, working in and with our portfolio companies across Climate, Healthcare, Agriculture and Computation. With regular meetups in London!
   
4. Travel the UK, US and EU and work with the some of the world's most entrepreneurial Professors and industrial scientists, in some of the most advanced research environments.
   
5. Get clear on what government agencies need you - the next innovators - to tell them and how to write a systematic policy proposal that can empower national innovation policy-makers to overcome commercial barriers.
   
6. Meet investors and venture ecosystem builders across our network including Fifty Years, Activate, ConceptionX, Zero Carbon Capital, Stripe, Equinor and more. Learn about the global impact they are making for a human thriving and planetary wellbeing and how to communicate your ideas to work with them.
   
7. Learn about the wide-array of careers open to science and technology PhD holders, by speaking to scientists and entrepreneurs working across venture creation, academia, industry and government. Gather a community of leaders across sectors to leverage the collective action Moonshot R&D requires.

About DSV

Deep Science Ventures is creating a future in which both humans and the planet can thrive.<