Summer Research Programme - Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute

Our nine-week Summer Research Programme aims to inspire bright and ambitious students to start their careers in cancer research.

This opportunity is offered to students who are interested in pursuing PhD study after completing their current degree.

Each student will be embedded in one of our multidisciplinary research groups to work on their own project, with access to our state-of-the-art Core Facilities.

You will have the opportunity to develop your project together with your supervisor who will discuss potential projects as part of the interview process.

Students work under the supervision of a postdoctoral or PhD researcher and participate in lab meetings. You will have the opportunity to network with Group Leaders at weekly seminars and at the end of your study period, you will have the opportunity to write a brief scientific report on your research project and present your findings at the Summer Programme Symposium.

The Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute Summer Research Programme will be held from Monday 6 July to Friday 4 September 2026.

All Summer Students will receive the equivalent of the Real Living Wage for the nine-week programme, and will be required to attend for 35 hours per week across five days. Single accommodation will be provided to participants free-of-charge at Corpus Christi College for the duration of the programme, including weekends.

It is expected that successful applicants will attend all nine weeks, so please ensure that you are available for the duration of the programme before applying. Accommodation will be available from Sunday 5th July 2026.

Standard applications are now open. See the Standard Applications section below for all details and a link to apply.

Applications for the 2026 Uganda Cancer Institute programme have now closed.

Standard Applications

Students can apply either through our standard process, or you can choose to be considered as part of our partnerships with the Uganda Cancer Institute. You can find out more about each on this page.

We are offering to reimburse the reasonable travel expenses of successful candidates, to and from Cambridge, upon production of the relevant receipts (to a maximum limit of £200), subject to terms and conditions.

Applicants must meet the following eligibility criteria:

You must be a registered student at a UK Higher Education institute, studying on an undergraduate degree course.
You should be engaged in a continuous period of study at the time of the Summer Research Programme (July-September 2026), for example:
- Year two of a three-year undergraduate course
- Year three of a four-year undergraduate course
- Year three of an integrated Master’s course (excluding pre-Master’s)

Note: This course is particularly suitable for students who are interested in progressing to a PhD in a related subject. We welcome applications from students intending to apply for PhD study commencing in the academic year 2027-28.

Applications are now open and will run until Monday 13 April at 12pm BST. As part of the application process you will be asked to pick a first and second choice project to join. You can find an outline of each project below.

Apply now

Project list

Creixell Group Project

Amelia Barclay (PhD Student) – Creixell Group

Principal Investigators: TBC

Specificity is a defining feature of signalling networks. The Creixell Lab has identified an arginine residue within ABL kinase that enables the kinase to recognise phosphorylated tyrosine residues prior to catalysing subsequent phosphorylation events. We are now interested in determining the cellular substrates that depend on this phosphopriming mechanism. In this summer project, the goal is to isolate key candidate substrates by immunoprecipitation and submit the samples to our proteomics core facility. We can use targeted proteomics to assess whether each substrate is phosphorylated at the site of interest. Core techniques used in this project include suspension cell culture, immunoprecipitation, western blotting and targeted proteomics analysis.

Hannon Group Project #1

Ivon Angelova (PhD Student) – Hannon Group

Principal Investigators: Dr Kirsty Sawicka and Dr Ian Cannell

Our research investigates how depletion of specific non-essential amino acids influences the tumour microenvironment, tumour metabolism, and the anti-tumour immune response. This summer project will focus primarily on studying how these amino acid restrictions modulate interactions between tumour cells and the surrounding microenvironment. The student will gain hands-on experience with different techniques including tissue culture, molecular cloning, transfection, Western blotting, PCR and flow cytometry.

Hannon Group Project #2

Nicole Hemmer (PhD Student) – Hannon Group

Principal Investigators: Dr Kirsty Sawicka and Dr Ian Cannell

We have generated novel lung metastatic breast cancer lines (p53/BRCA1/2/CDK12 KO) to model and study the effect of genomic instability on the tumour microenvironment (TME). A project may involve the further characterisation of these cell lines for instance their response to targeted drug treatment in tissue culture (and potentially in vivo in mice). Furthermore we are developing spatial WILDseq tumour barcoding to assess how tumour clones shape the TME in primary tumours and metastases and a student project could include technology advancement (cloning, lentiviral barcoding of tumour cells, assessment of barcode swapping, laser capture microdissection).

Hannon Group Project #3

Anna-Maria Papameletiou (PhD Student) – Hannon Group

Principal Investigator: Dr Ben Nicholson

Our research investigates transposable elements, selfish genomic elements that replicate within host cells and their control by the piRNA pathway. This summer project will focus on how these transposable elements evolve within Drosophila melanogaster and across other drosophilids, as well as how they co-evolve with the piRNA pathway. The project is fully computational and will allow the student to gain hands-on experience with bioinformatics techniques such as hidden Markov models, evolutionary analysis (multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetics) and -omics (RNA-seq, sRNA-seq) analysis.

Mair Group Project

Dr Hongrun Zhang (Postdoctoral Researcher) – Mair Group

Principal Investigator: Dr Richard Mair

This research project focuses on predicting key molecular phenotypes of glioma (such as IDH mutation and MGMT promoter methylation) from pre-operative MRI, with the aim of developing a non-invasive approach to support brain tumor diagnosis. The primary objective is to evaluate the capability of machine learning models – particularly deep learning – in predicting these molecular markers from imaging data. In addition, the project will investigate the interpretability of the predictive models to better understand which imaging features contribute to the predictions.

Narita Group Project

Jack Zhan (PhD Student) – Narita Group
The Narita Lab has a long-standing research interest on the structure of the nucleus in the context of cellular senescence and ageing, including chromatin architecture and nuclear envelope dynamics, and how they contribute to the erosion of cellular identity and function in senescence and ageing. For the summer project, we are looking for a student with strong wet lab skills in cell biology and potential mouse work experience, or a student with experience in biophysical modelling of protein-protein interactions using computational approaches. The student will benefit from hands-on research and may contribute to publications within the lab.

Uganda Cancer Institute Applications

In partnership with Cambridge Africa, we’ve teamed up with the Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI) to support them in their mission to provide state-of-the-art cancer care and prevention. Each year, two places on our Undergraduate Summer Research Programme are reserved for students from the UCI and the eastern Africa region.

Please do not apply to this route unless you are a student from the UCI or the Eastern African region.