Join us

Become a member and discover where geography can take you.

Join us
Two people stood conversing on a pavement of an urban street. The person on the left is holding pen and paper.

RGS-IBG Postgraduate Research Awards

The Society offers awards of up to £2,500 for PhD students undertaking fieldwork/data collection to advance geographical knowledge. These awards, offered to individuals, aim to help students establish themselves in their particular field.

About the Awards

The RGS-IBG Postgraduate Research Awards were established in 2008 to support PhD students undertaking research and fieldwork. Applicants must be registered at a UK Higher Education Institution. Preference is given to students who do not receive full funding from a research council, university or comparable levels of support from other sources for fieldwork and data collection.

The RGS-IBG Postgraduate Research Awards include the Albert Reckitt Awards, Walters Kundert Grants, the Geographical Club AwardHong Kong Research Grants and the Dudley Stamp Memorial Award. If your application to the Postgraduate Research Awards is successful you may be given a named award. If you wish to apply for a named award based on your research discipline (such as the Hong Kong Research Grant), please specify this in section 1 of the application form.

Please note, applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application by mid-March 2024 following the external review process. Except for under exceptional circumstances, fieldwork should not begin before 1 April 2024. The Society is unable to support fieldwork which has already taken place. 

Deadline: 23 November 

 

Apply now

All prospective grant applicants are encouraged to read our Advice and Resources pages, which include more information about the grants programme, its conditions, how to apply for a grant and what is expected if your application is successful. Please read this information carefully and send your application, or any enquiries, by email to grants@rgs.org.

 

2023 recipients

Gopikaa Vijayakumar (University of Glasgow) Oxic methane production in Arctic Wetlands (OMPArc)

Elise Dehaen (University of Exeter) Hydraulic conductivity and litter production in Colombian peatlands: field measurements for improved peatland carbon modelling in JULES

Maria Mills (University of Leicester) Investigating the accuracy of stem respiration estimates: scaling methods, and vertical and diurnal variation

Prerna Bindra (University of Cambridge) The Aftermath: Human Implications of Conservation Related Relocations and the Institutions that Shape Them

Armando Caroca (University of Manchester) Unfolding the sacrifice zone: socio-spatial impact of mining waste deposits on urban areas in Chile

Sophie Manson (Oxford Brookes University) Quantifying the value of wildlife-friendly farming practices and their effect on ecosystem services in smallholder coffee farms in West Java, Indonesia

Eleanor Fox (University of Exeter) The relationships between mountain cryosphere change and water availability and use for communities in the semi-arid Chilean Andes

Brian Nalumenya (Coventry University) Strategies for sustainable water resources management in Uganda

Bruno Friedel (University of Oxford) The relationship between cohousing groups and land in a carbon and resource constrained world

Ihsan Abualrob (Durham University) Digitalising Archival Records: The British Council and Palestinians

Elliot Fisher (University of Edinburgh) The Isle of Fire: Making Sense of Fire In Madagascar’s Open Ecosystems

Camille Choquet (University of St Andrews) Conserving the tropical peatlands of the north Peruvian Amazon while supporting and improving the livelihoods of the people who live there: an analysis of the multi-level strategies 

Cheng Fang (Durham University) Mobilising Global Financial Networks, Making the “China Concepts": Examining the Multi-scalar State Building in Chinese Companies' Oversees Listings

Louisa Brain (Queen Mary University of London) Navigating im/mobility and environmental change in Western Kenya

Neal Halforty (Queen's University Belfast) A Study of Neighbourhood Attachment and Place Identity in a Post Conflict Society: Portugese Communities in Northern Ireland

Catherine Clarke (University College London) The negotiation and implementation of area-based conservation targets in the Colombia Amazon

Rosie Lewis (University of Leeds) Assessing the health hazards of chronic exposures to volcanic gases on Montserrat, Eastern Caribbean

Hannah Runeckles (Newcastle University) Investigating geomorphological impacts of sand mining upon the Red River Delta, Viet Nam, and its communities

Alex Scoffield (University of Leeds) ENIGMA: Examining the physical conditions of a high-elevation Himalayan glacial lake

Charlotte Curry (University of Sheffield) Investigating the impacts of mining on glacier change in the central Chilean Andes

 

2022 recipients

Alejandra Pizarro Choy (University of St Andrews) The geopolitical ecology of conservation funding: Discourse and power in counter illegal wildlife trade programmes in Peru

Anna Stanworth (University of Exeter) Assessing ecosystem service provision from local to landscape scale in Papua New Guinea

Sophie Erfurth (University of Oxford) Institutional trust and collective action in groundwater user groups in Tunisia

Kenta Sayama (University of Oxford) Evaluating the importance of geocultural context for the conservation of Quaternary Palaeoenvironment Archives in Sharjah, UAE

Charlie Hackforth (University College London) Insect-mediated ecosystem functioning in Congolese Peat Swamp Forest: consequences of dung beetle activity on peat formation

Emma Underwood (Kingston University London) Parameterising range-shift predictions for mechanistic distribution models using demographic data in a Biodiversity Hotspot

Dhaval Joshi (University of Edinburgh) Peeping down, looking forward: exploring the knowledge(s) of groundwater governance in India

Emma Watts (University of Southampton) The 2018 rift eruption of Kilauea: Pyroclastic deposits and eruption dynamics of Fissure 8

Conner Morison (University of Edinburgh) Environmental and Societal Impacts of the 939 AD Eldgjá Fissure Eruption, Iceland

Juniper Kiss (University of Southampton) Swidden agriculture meets new soil etagenomics approach in Papua New Guinea

Matthew Beach (Queen Mary University of London) Connective tissues: (Un)lively materialities of gelatine and collagen

Natasha Mannion (Newcastle University) Understanding the role of hunting in mammal biodiversity responses to infrastructure expansion in the Heart of Borneo

Michael Wenborn (Oxford Brookes University) Scoping assessment of the challenges of co-existence of elephants and rural communities

Rosie Knowles (Royal Holloway, University of London) Re-imagining Liminal Therapeutic Landscapes

Rosemary Huck (University of Oxford) Quantifying soil crust erodibility in fragile semi-arid dune systems

 

Postgraduate Research Awards recipients 2008-2021