Eligibility and Dates

The following paid internships are available for the summer of 2026. They are only open to certain undergraduate students.

The student must have "home fees" status in the UK, that is, eligible for UK tuition.
The student must be in middle years of study, that is, not first year or final year.
Positions are available between June 15 and August 31, 2026. Exact dates are flexible. Part-time appointments are possible.

Interested students should send an email with their CV, transcripts, and a description of their background and interest in the project to Dr. Rik Sarkar, and use the links below to apply.

Application Deadline: 20th April, 2026

Internship 1: Mapping and Benchmarking Off-Target Drug Design Resources

This project will find, compare, and test various resources in drug design. For example, identify the contents of datasets, run models to evaluate their speed and accuracy, and compare the results.

In addition to general drug design resources, it will be particularly focused on off-target effects in drug design. This is where a drug designed to target a particular protein also binds to other proteins, which can cause side effects.

The project is a collaboration between the School of Informatics and the School of Biology in Edinburgh. It is part of the CDT in Biomedical Innovation.

Biomedical Innovation CDT Research Experience Scheme (details and application)

Internship 2: Benchmarking Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning Frameworks

Zero-knowledge proofs are a class of techniques for proving certain properties of programs without leaking any additional information. Recently, several packages have been developed for machine learning models.

This project will compare the performance and various properties of these packages, and create an open-source package.

ML Systems CDT Research Experience Scheme (details and application)