National Oceanography Centre

The National Oceanography Centre (NOC) is the United Kingdom’s centre of excellence for oceanographic sciences. We have a remit to provide national capability and leadership for big ocean science.

Our Vision
Our vision is that, by 2025, the National Oceanography Centre will be seen as the world’s most innovative oceanographic institution.

Our Mission
Our mission is to make sense of changing seas, upon which future human prosperity and wellbeing depends. We intend to achieve this is by:-

Going forwards, we will better exploit the synergies across these different supporting pillars of our mission to drive novel and innovative approaches to our work, enabling us to do things that are distinctive and that few others could do.

Our Strategic Goals

Our Strategic Goals are a balanced series of aims that will help us work together as ‘one NOC’ in driving forwards the whole organisation towards our common vision. Under each of these goals are high-level Strategic Objectives that emphasise integration and innovation.

The first four goals relate directly to different aspects of our primary purpose of advancing science;

The remaining three goals enable those above:

Graduate School of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (GSNOCS)

Funding for PhD students is available from a number of sources including INSPIRE, a NERC funded Doctoral Training Partnership. Our current PhD students work on cutting edge research problems spanning all aspects of the natural sciences, for example, from algal biofuels through reconstructing past climates and ocean chemistry to investigating rogue waves.

We recruit about 30 new PhD students every year to carry out research of the highest quality and to train the next generation of principal investigators, policy advisors and leaders of industry. Click on one of the links below to find out about GSNOCS, available PhD projects or how to apply. Visit the Ocean and Earth Science pages for more on what to expect if you come here, or if you are interested in a Masters degree.

Projects for September 2021 start are now advertised.

Staff numbers updated to 2017/18