Cohort 4 of the NIHR Undergraduate Internship Programme (UIP) is open. Early career researchers can apply for funding to host up to three undergraduate interns on short, fully funded placements, and gain supervisory and funding application experience in the process.
The programme exists to attract students from underrepresented professions into health and social care research, reaching them early, while they are still studying. Interns must be in the penultimate year of their undergraduate degree. Placements last 2 to 4, 4 to 6 or 6 to 8 weeks, and can be scheduled at any point in the contracted financial year. It sits alongside NIHR’s other pipeline schemes, such as the masters programme funded to bring students into research, and its logic is the same one running through the research workforce plans for England: build capacity in the professions that research currently under-recruits from.
For the applicant, this is a developmental award as much as a funding one. You design the internship, you supervise, and you build experience of writing a competitive funding application on a scheme where the stakes are lower than a fellowship. If you want a sense of where that experience leads, one researcher has written on what their first major NIHR award taught them. There is also an in-person event for supervisors and interns towards the end of the funded period.
What you can apply for
- Supervision costs of up to £250 per intern, capped at £750 per application. You cannot claim these if you already hold NIHR personal award funding.
- Intern costs, meaning a stipend, salary or bursary covering the full duration of each placement.
- Travel and accommodation of up to £1,000 per intern, where the costs are known and can be justified.
- Training and development of up to £200 per intern.
The award starts on 1 April 2027, and internships must take place between 1 April 2027 and 31 March 2028. NIHR’s finance guidance for applicants sets out the costing assumptions you will be held to.
Who can apply?
You must be an early career researcher with a PhD, or equivalent demonstrable research experience, working directly in one of the target disciplines or professions. Your proposed host organisation must be an English Higher Education Institution, NHS body, social care organisation or other provider of health and care services.
An application can name up to three early career researchers, with a lead applicant plus co-applicants and mentors where relevant, and each supervises one intern. You should not have held a UIP award before unless you can provide robust justification.
One restriction worth checking before you start: as an applicant for an NIHR Academy personal career development award, you can only have one application under consideration at a time. If you have something else in with NIHR Academy, wait for the outcome or email ipps@nihr.ac.uk first, because a second application will be deemed ineligible.
Priority disciplines
Internships must sit within one of the following:
- nursing
- midwifery
- allied health professionals
- pharmacy
- radiography
- healthcare science
- data science
- public health
- social care
- research methodology
For this round, NIHR particularly welcomes applications from pharmacy and radiography professionals, or proposing internships in those areas, and has ring-fenced additional funding for them.
Several of these routes into research are poorly signposted to students. If you are supervising in one of them, our blogs on moving from nursing into research and the role of a research nurse in dementia trials are useful things to point an intern towards.
The internship proposal itself must meet NIHR’s remit for personal awards, so it needs to be early translational (experimental medicine), clinical or applied research relating to health, public health or social care.
What you submit
Applications go through the NIHR awards management system and need the completed ‘Flexible upload’ template, plus narrative CVs for everyone involved in delivering the placement. Within the upload you will write:
- how you will advertise the internships, internally and externally (3,000 characters)
- how the internships will meet NIHR’s research inclusion commitments (3,000 characters)
- a proposal and supervisory arrangements for each intern (9,000 characters per intern)
- a detailed budget breakdown with justification on a per-intern basis
Do not treat the inclusion section as boilerplate. Inclusion is a condition of NIHR funding, not a nice-to-have, and on this scheme it is specifically about who hears that the internships exist. If you are looking for a sense of what strong NIHR application writing reads like, the panel view of what makes an application excellent transfers reasonably well.
Free and confidential help with developing an application is available through the NIHR Research Support Service. If you need a reasonable adjustment to complete the application, contact ipps@nihr.ac.uk rather than describing it in the application itself, and include any associated costs in your budget.
Key dates
- 9 September 2026, 1.00pm, opened to applications
- 4 November 2026, 1.00pm, applications close
- November 2026 to February 2027, assessment and funding decisions
- 1 April 2027, award start date
- 1 April 2027 to 31 March 2028, window in which internships must take place
Reference ID 2026/497. Applications received after 1.00pm on 4 November will not be considered. Full details are on the NIHR funding opportunity page, and questions go to ipps@nihr.ac.uk.
If you are an undergraduate rather than a prospective supervisor, this call is not for you to apply to. Successful hosts recruit their interns through their own organisation’s normal processes, so watch for those adverts later. Our blog on the life of an undergraduate in research gives a sense of what a placement like this involves, and we list research posts and studentships on our jobs board year round.
Visit funding web page
(https://www.nihr.ac.uk/funding/nihr-undergraduate-internship-programme-cohort-4/2026497)
