About the Project
We are looking to recruit highly motivated, committed researcher who wants to apply state-of-the-art engineering biology and science to deliver real-world solutions for a sustainable future.
The UK’s water supplies are under growing pressure from climate change, population growth, ageing infrastructure, and water-intensive industries. Conventional treatment adds further strain, with its chemical and energy demands becoming increasingly unsustainable. Meeting future demand will require fundamentally new approaches to how we source and treat water.
Rainwater harvesting (RWH) offers one such approach: capturing and treating rainwater locally to reduce reliance on mains supply and improve water resilience. Biofiltration provides a low-energy, low-chemical route to treating that water to the quality required for its intended use, potentially including drinking water. What’s missing is a robust, scalable RWH system that can reliably deliver predicable water quality that is biological stability, has minimal nutrients and low microbial regrowth potential.
In this PhD, delivered in partnership with Scottish Water, you’ll optimise a pilot-scale RWH treatment train built around biologically enhanced biofilters, where microbial communities are deliberately shaped to improve performance. Building on Glasgow’s prior work showing biofilter performance can be tuned through ecological selection pressures like temperature, depth, and inoculation strategy, you’ll investigate how communities can be directed to boost contaminant removal and biological stability. Crucially, you’ll do this at pilot scale, using Glasgow’s newly built RWH facility as a living laboratory under real-world conditions.
You’ll determine how rainwater quality varies seasonally and how pre-storage conditions shape that variation, evaluate engineered biofilter performance by tracking how storage conditions influence microbial community assembly, treatment efficiency, and effluent biological stability, and compare final polishing technologies for potable water production, including gravity-driven membrane (GDM) filtration and UV treatment.
Biological stability, and specifically the regrowth potential of opportunistic pathogens in treated water, is the key parameter you’ll use throughout to optimise treatment and define safe storage limits. You’ll draw on a comprehensive analytical toolkit to do this, measuring biostability and water quality using flow cytometry (FCM), microbial growth potential assays, and organic carbon characterisation, and applying environmental microbiology techniques including amplicon sequencing of microbial communities and ddPCR/qPCR quantification of total microbial communities and target pathogens. Throughout, you’ll operate Glasgow’s pilot-scale biofilters directly and work closely with project partner Scottish Water.
By integrating engineered microbial ecology with sustainable treatment technology, you’ll help establish design principles for biology-driven rainwater treatment, supporting a circular, climate-resilient water future. Beyond the lab, you’ll build skills in translating biological research into deployable infrastructure and gain firsthand experience of how a water utility evaluates and adopts new treatment technology, skills increasingly valued as the sector moves toward biologically engineered, climate-resilient solutions.
You’ll be based at the University of Glasgow’s Advanced Research Centre, part of the Water and Environment Research Group, with direct access to the new pilot-scale RWH facility and a world-leading research environment tackling some of the most pressing challenges in sustainable, biology-driven water treatment. You’ll also join a wider NERC-funded doctoral cohort across the EngBio4Env network of universities and industry partners
This studentship is open to applicants who qualify for UK Home tuition fee status, including students from the Republic of Ireland, who are eligible for UK Home fee status under the Common Travel Area arrangement. Due to funding restrictions, applicants who do not meet Home fee criteria are not eligible to apply for this project.
Applicants should hold, or expect to achieve, a minimum of a 2:1 Honours degree, in a relevant subject area. Suitable backgrounds include Environmental Microbiology, Water Science, Water/Environmental/Civil Engineering, as well as Molecular Biology, Microbiology, Biotechnology, Ecology, or Environmental Science more broadly. A Master’s degree while not essential, is desirable, and applicants must have the ability to work across disciplines and in collaboration with industry and academic partners.
How to Apply:
Applications, to include a: CV, one page letter of motivation and names and contact details of two references to be sent to Prof Cindy Smith cindy.smith@glasgow.ac.uk
Funding Notes
Funded by the NERC EngBio4Env Doctoral Focal Award and Scottish Water, this PhD will receive an annual tax-free stipend of £31,805. This includes an enhanced stipend £10,000 above the UKRI level received through the TechExpert Pilot scheme, also offering participation in TechExpert activities.
