The Royal Veterinary College has been awarded a prestigious grant to transform understanding of animal and human relationships.
The Royal Veterinary College (RVC), in partnership with the University of Exeter, has been awarded a prestigious multi-million-pound Leverhulme Centenary Doctoral Scholarship grant by the Leverhulme Trust. The grant is one of only 10 awards to mark the Trust’s Centenary and will support the establishment of an ambitious doctoral training programme that will transform our understanding of animals and our relationships with them.
Knowing Animals: The Leverhulme Doctoral Programme on Interdisciplinary Pathways to Multispecies Understanding will commence in October 2027 and will support up to 24 PhD students. In order to broaden access to these opportunities, the Programme will also include six dedicated Masters plus PhD studentships, for students from under-represented backgrounds.
The RVC-Exeter partnership will bring together world-class academic excellence from animal welfare science, animal behaviour and ecology to the humanities, the arts and more. Studying questions that span these subject areas will equip a new generation of researchers to more profoundly understand and represent animals’ perspectives and deploy this holistic knowledge to navigate the complex and changing relations between animals and humans.
These relationships – and how they are currently understood – are central to many of today’s key global challenges, from food security and antimicrobial resistance to biodiversity loss and global warming, as well as ethical considerations around animal breeding, ownership and use.
The Leverhulme Centenary Doctoral Scholarship scheme supports ambitious, interdisciplinary doctoral training programmes that have the potential to generate new ideas and significant research advances. This new RVC-Exeter partnership will create strong bonds across the two institutions and among the various academic disciplines and develop fresh perspectives on multispecies understanding to address challenges affecting animal, human and ecosystem wellbeing.
The programme will be led by Dr Siobhan Abeyesinghe, Associate Professor in Animal Behaviour and Welfare Science and Head of Animal Welfare Science and Ethics at the RVC; and will be delivered in partnership with academic experts in animal behaviour; ecology; and humanities, arts and social sciences across UoE’s departments.
For more information about this prestigious award, please visit the RVC or University of Exeter.