Jane Suter is unusually focused for a doctoral student. She has a very clear idea of her direction of research -which may take only two years -and a distinction in her MSc means that she is well funded.

It came as a bit of a shock to Lisa Willats when, two weeks after she started her PhD, the men who pioneered her area of research, magnetic-resonance imaging, were awarded a Nobel prize. "It put a spring in people's step," she says.

Two years into their research, Michael North finds out how academia is treating the four PhD students whose progress The Times Higher is charting