A Llanelli student has won a scholarship worth more than £110,000 to fund his PhD at Swansea University — and the research he’ll be doing is more surprising than you might expect.

Ben Williams will spend the next few years studying what happens to worms when medicines get into rivers and waterways. It’s a growing environmental concern: when people take medication, traces of those drugs pass through the body and into the water system, where they can affect wildlife in ways scientists are still working to understand.

The problem is more widespread than many people realise. Painkillers, antidepressants, antibiotics and hormones from contraceptive pills have all been detected in rivers across the UK. While the concentrations are often low, researchers are increasingly concerned about the long-term effects on aquatic life — and ultimately on the water we drink.

Ben’s work will focus on a small worm species used widely in environmental research, chosen because it responds clearly to changes in water quality and gives scientists a reliable way to measure the impact of chemical contamination.

Ben, who grew up in Llanelli and completed both his undergraduate and masters degrees at Swansea, is one of just four people in the country to win the newly launched Sir David Jack PhD Scholarship, run by the British Pharmacological Society. The award is named after the late Sir David Jack, a pioneering scientist who developed some of the most widely used asthma medications in the world.

The Sir David Jack scholarship was made possible by a donation from Sir David’s family, and forms the first of 40 PhD projects the Society plans to fund over the next decade with the aim of supporting the next generation of researchers in the field.

The scholarship covers Ben’s tuition fees, up to £10,000 a year in research costs, a living stipend and funding to attend scientific conferences — adding up to around £110,000 in total. He starts his PhD in October.

Ben said: “It is a phenomenal academic and personal honour to be awarded this scholarship in its inaugural year. I would like to thank the Society for seeing something in me and providing the opportunity to further myself as an independent researcher.”

He also thanked his supervisors at Swansea for their support: “The continued support and wealth of knowledge that has been provided has enabled me to be here today.”

His PhD will be carried out within Swansea University’s Worm Integrative Research Lab — known as SWIRL — with support from supervisors Dr Aidan Seeley, Professor Martin Clift and Dr Sophie Reed.

Dr Seeley, who leads the lab and runs Swansea’s Medical Pharmacology degree programmes, said: “This is a fantastic result for Ben, the supervisory team, SWIRL and for the Medical School. It really does demonstrate the calibre of students that we produce here in Swansea.”

For Ben, the scholarship is the culmination of years of work building towards a career in research — and a sign that science rooted in practical, real-world questions is attracting serious investment. Environmental pharmacology is a relatively young field, and Swansea’s SWIRL lab is positioning itself at the forefront of it.

More information about studying Medical Pharmacology at Swansea University is available at swansea.ac.uk.