PhD Studentship: Personalised pulmonary rehabilitation: harnessing the power of cardiopulmonary exercise testing

Project Title: Personalised pulmonary rehabilitation: harnessing the power of cardiopulmonary exercise testing

Project Description:

Approximately 12 million people in the UK have a diagnosis of a chronic lung disease (CLD); diseases that account for one in five deaths. Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) – a structured exercise therapy – is a standard of care for management of breathlessness, improving quality of life, and reducing exacerbation rates. Presently, Quality Standards for Pulmonary Rehabilitation (BTS, 2014) recommend individualisation of PR programmes, yet no explicit guidance is provided on how to facilitate this. We hypothesise that gold-standard physiological assessment via cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) may provide mechanisms for individualisation.

The appointed PhD student will work towards the following main objectives; 1). systematically review existing literature on how CPET is currently utilised in assessing and prescribing PR programmes in CLD, 2). identify physiological responses of CPET-derived, steady-state, exercise in people with CLD, 3). utilise CPET-derived responses to design individualised and remote PR programmes in people with CLD, and 4). evaluate, via quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the feasibility and efficacy of individualised and remote PR programmes in people with CLD. The PhD student will be primarily based at St Luke’s Campus, have access to state-of-the-art facilities and support in developing quantitative and qualitative researcher skills – systematic reviews, interview design, statistical analyses, qualitative analyses, exercise-testing techniques and patient engagement.

For further enquiries, please contact Dr Owen Tomlinson at [email protected] .

Entry requirements:

Applicants should have obtained, or be about to obtain, a First or Upper Second Class UK Honours degree, or the equivalent qualifications gained outside the UK, in an appropriate area of science or technology.  Applicants with a Lower Second Class degree will be considered if they also have Masters degree or have significant relevant non-academic experience.

To support accessibility to PhD training opportunities, these studentships are only available to applicants that have not previously obtained or about to obtain a PhD degree (or equivalent).

If English is not your first language you will need to have achieved at least 6.5 in IELTS and no less than 6.5 in any section by the start of the project.  Further information about these English requirements, please visit the following link https://www.exeter.ac.uk/study/englishlanguagerequirements/

The closing date for applications is midnight on Friday 31st March 2023.  Interviews are likely to take place w/c 10 April 2023.