Our philosophy is that embracing and supporting diversity in all forms will lead to a collaborative research culture in which science and scientists can flourish. Although diversity will be a consideration in everything that we do, we have identified three areas where we can maximise the diversity in our Programme, and consequently impact on the wider University and community. These areas are diversity in the supervisor pool, diversity in the application process, and diversity in our communication and impact activities. We consider career stage, ethnic, gender, geographical, religious, scientific, and socioeconomic diversity.

By promoting diversity in our directorate, supervisor pool, lecturers and advisory board we create an environment in which people of all career stages, ethnic and geographic origins, genders, and religious denominations feel comfortable and can thrive.

Ensuring a diverse directorate and supervisor pool ensures that our shortlisting and interview panels are also diverse. All members of these panels undertake EED&I and implicit bias training before shortlisting and interviews. By providing diverse role models in our supervisor pool we encourage applications from a diverse range of backgrounds. We use an anonymised shortlisting process to help prevent gender and ethnic bias. Our Programme participates in and supports the University UNIQ+ scheme, which works with students from under-represented backgrounds that have not typically applied to Oxford.

Students on our Programme will actively participate in public engagement activities training them in the importance of communicating their work to a wide range of audiences. We have participated in well-established public events such as Oxford Open Doors, the Royal Society Summer Science Festival, and Pint of Science. We also target our outreach and public engagement activities so as to maximise the ethnic, gender, geographical, religious, and socioeconomic diversity of the audience.

A very strong focus on diversity of ethnicity, gender, geographical origin, religious, socioeconomic situation, supervisor career stage and scientific expertise provides the foundations for our efforts towards, and commitment to, a positive research culture. We underpin our student experience with reinvigorated training and support for supervisors. Diversity in the supervisor pool provides diverse role models and lead to diversity in the applicant pool. The UNIQ+ scheme supports applicants from diverse background to apply to our programme. Our unique strategy of appointing career mentors at the start of the DPhil supports student to pursue a wide range of career choices. By spanning MPLS and MSD within Oxford, we catalyse culture change within the University and beyond.