We invite you to participate in our Cambridge Science Summer School, a unique 8-week residential laboratory research-based programme for undergraduates finishing their degrees, graduates studying for their Master’s and for medical and veterinary students from our partner universities overseas. The Cambridge Science Summer School focuses on practical research training at the laboratory bench, using state-of-the-art facilities within our top research laboratories and under the dedicated mentorship of that laboratory’s Principal Investigator. The School’s overarching goal is to help you develop those experimental, creative and innovative skills needed to make new scientific discoveries. The programme is hosted by four of the largest departments in the School of Biological Sciences – the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience (PDN) and the Departments of Pathology, Pharmacology and Biochemistry, together with the Gurdon Institute for Developmental and Cancer Biology and the Wellcome Trust/MRC Stem Cell Institute.

What you, the student, gets from the Cambridge Science Summer School

Great science is done in many ways around the world. The Cambridge Science Summer School offers you the opportunity to get to know our “Cambridge way” of doing science. We have a long tradition of free thought and passionate discourse and a belief that scientific truths are uncovered through experimentation. We will teach you how to generate experimentally testable hypotheses and how to conceive, plan, execute and interpret experiments. We will also teach you how to present data, receive and use constructive criticism of your own experiments. Cambridge is a collegiate university, comprised of many, relatively small, independent colleges that provide accommodation and social interaction and is each home to an intellectually diverse community of students and dons. We hope to accommodate participants within our Cambridge Colleges and give you the opportunity of experiencing their uniquely vibrant, vivid, multicultural, sociable life style. All Cambridge Science Summer School students enjoy full departmental membership, with access to all departmental seminars, journal clubs, discussion groups and social events.

Upon your successful completion of the Summer School, we will provide you with a formal certificate of course completion signed by the Programme Director and a document signed by the Heads of participating departments which contains detailed commentary from your laboratory mentor, describing the project you undertook and the techniques and  technologies you used, and will also confirm that you have achieved the requisite standard of scientific acumen and endeavour. This document may be used by you for future career development and, we hope, encourage you to return to Cambridge in the future as a graduate student or post-doctoral fellow.

Information

For further information on the Cambridge Science Summer School, including a full brochure, application forms and details of fees and scholarships, please contact the Programme Director Dr Joyce Wong on csss2013@bioc.cam.ac.uk . If you are a member of one of our partnered universities, please contact it for information on sponsorship of the Summer School. If you are a student at an academic institution not yet partnered with us, please ask your host university to contact the Programme Director.