Our department is a centre of research excellence with one of the largest graduate geography schools in the UK. We currently have around 100 PhD students and approximately 180 master's students. Teaching is research-led, the research themes that provide the central focus for our international reputation centre on: the study of cultural, political and social change in cities, where our work explores major cities in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa; linkages between environment and development in low-income locations with a specialist interest in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America; monitoring and modelling of environmental processes and risk. Our research and teaching interests have a multidisciplinary flavour both between human and physical geography and across neighbouring disciplines, with academic staff having first degrees in archaeology, biology, environmental science, geology, history, physics, political science, social statistics and sociology as well as geography. These interests are reflected in the wide range of our taught programmes.

The department holds an induction programme the week before start of term. We provide research training in accordance with the specific guidelines of the various Research Councils (ie AHRC for humanities type human geography, ESRC for social scientific human geography and NERC for physical geography). During induction you will be assigned to the appropriate training programme (ie human or physical), your training needs assessed, and an individualised research training plan designed by you and your supervisory committee. These individual training plans are then approved by the Departmental Postgraduate Research Student Committee (DPRSC) to ensure quality and consistency.

It is departmental policy to provide each graduate research student with desk space and access to computers for doing their work. The graduate room is equipped with networked workstations and printer access. In addition, the department has excellent computer facilities especially for graduates in specific rooms, with a designated Masters computer room for students requiring specialist software.

Funding is available from a wide range of sources and includes departmental, School and College bursaries, as well as research council funding (AHRC, ESRC and NERC). Please visit our website for more details of graduate funding opportunities.