DPhil: Parkinson's Circuits and Deep Brain Stimulation

Four funded DPhil projects on Parkinson's circuit physiology and deep brain stimulation at Oxford's Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences , all entered through a single admissions round closing at midday on 1 December 2026.

The Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences (NDCN) is advertising four doctoral projects for 2027-28 entry, and they sit in the same territory: how the brain's motor circuits misfire in Parkinson's disease, and how stimulation can be timed and targeted to correct them. They share a supervisor pool, a deadline and an application route, so this listing covers all four rather than splitting them into near-identical adverts.

The four projects

• Discovering and translating physiological biomarkers for personalised adaptive Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's disease — Associate Professor Ashwini Oswal, Professor Tim Denison, Associate Professor Hayriye Cagnan and Dr Bahman Abdi-Sargezeh.
• Developing and Testing Brain Stimulation Patterns to Promote Half-Harmonic Entrainment for Therapeutic Benefit in Parkinson's Disease — Dr Benoit Duchet and Professor Huiling Tan.
• Phase-locked Deep Brain Stimulation to restore neural dynamics in Parkinson's Disease — Professor Huiling Tan, Dr Shenghong He and Professor Andrew Sharott.
• Understanding neural circuit dynamics in models of Parkinson's — Professor Peter Magill, Professor Andrew Sharott, Dr Juan Gallego and Dr Hayley Collins.

Three of the four work with human recordings and stimulation hardware and lean computational and clinical. The fourth is preclinical, mapping circuit dynamics directly in animal models. Between them they suit applicants arriving from engineering, physics, computational neuroscience, clinical medicine or basic neuroscience — you do not need to have done all of it before.

Funding

All four are advertised as competition funded and open to students worldwide. The University expects to offer over 1,200 full or partial graduate scholarships for 2027-28 entry, allocated largely on academic merit. NDCN and the Oxford colleges also run their own named studentships, which carry separate criteria and reference numbers, so read the department's studentship pages alongside the course page before you apply.

Before you apply

NDCN expects you to have a supervisor's support in place before you submit. That means contacting the named supervisor for the project you want, talking it through, and listing them on the application form. If you have not done this before, our advice on assessing and approaching a new lab is the place to start.

The application asks for:

• Official transcripts
• Three academic or professional references
• A statement of purpose, 500 words maximum
• A research proposal, 500 words maximum

The DPhil runs three to four years full time, or six to eight years part time. Part-time students still have to be in Oxford for a minimum of 30 days a year, so this is not a remote route.

Deadline

12:00 midday UK time, Tuesday 1 December 2026, for entry in 2027-28. Both full-time and part-time applications close at the same point.

Full course details, entry requirements and the application form are on the University of Oxford graduate admissions page for the DPhil in Clinical Neurosciences.