MORU Students

MORU is located in Bangkok, Thailand. We have our primary base here at the Mahidol University, the Faculty of Tropical Medicine, and it's a research collaboration between Mahidol University, the University of Oxford and the Wellcome Trust of the United Kingdom.

So a key focus of MORU is capacity building by allowing students and researchers to work within a world-class research environment.

So students, when they come to MORU, are very lucky - they have the opportunity to work in a number of areas for which we have a natural advantage; we have a very active and world-renowned malaria research team, microbiology which is focusing on diseases such as melioidosis and rickettsial diseases, as well as pharmacology, mathematical modelling, bioethics and community engagement, and so what we have is the opportunity for students to really broaden their horizons in a multidisciplinary environment.

The best thing about being a student in MORU is that you have the incredible opportunity to talk to probably some of the best researchers in tropical medicine and you have a chance to interact with them, but also you have a chance to think very broadly - you're not confined to only one single subject or project.

Being here, even though my title is a PhD student, we do research from drafting the protocol until collecting the data, I see it and then write a paper.

Within just three years I have done all of that already and so I think that one thing that's special about MORU is I don't see the line where I jump from the student to the scientist it just comes by here, it's just all together here.

We have three major universities for which we enrol students: University of Oxford, the Open University of the UK as well as Mahidol University here in Thailand, but we also accept students from many other universities around the world.

You've got to really know what you want to do so if you really want to work on this disease or whichever, be motivated, be passionate about your work because people here are very passionate - I think that's one of the benefits of MORU - everyone's really into their work and you can see that.

Working in this international environment is quite different because of language, but also because of different cultural interactions and this really I think is amazing to do because you learn so much from these different backgrounds if you didn't have that you might be stuck in the same line of thought.

One of the nice things is you get to see students coming in fairly inexperienced, fairly green, and then coming out at the other end of the process being qualified researchers that can then go on and take the next step in their career and also provide mentorship to others, so it's all part of the circle of life.