The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) enables Cambridge undergraduates to spend 8-10 weeks over the summer helping with research activities taking place at Cambridge University.
The paid internships offered through this programme give students insights into the research being carried out by the world-class academics here. They also give students opportunities to develop some of the technical and transferable skills required in research activities and many other graduate careers.
UROP placements being offered in this Department are advertised below.
How do UROP placements work?
The programme is open to any Cambridge University undergraduate who is not in their final year of study. A UROP placement takes place over the Long Summer Vacation and normally lasts 8-10 weeks. UROP students will be paid National Living Wage, plus the appropriate holiday pay. Students' pay is subject to appropriate deductions (i.e. for income tax and National Insurance contributions).
Before projects start
If your application is successful and you are assigned to a project, you will be sent a number of forms to complete and sign. These must be returned to our Human Resources (HR) team before the project starts.
Your schedule of work should also be negotiated with your supervisors before starting the project.
Requirements
Please be aware that students on UROP placements MUST be living in the UK (even if they are working from home) and must have the right to work in the UK.
Students' work is expected to conform to an acceptable technical standard. Supervisors retain the right to terminate appointments, if performance remains below the required standard, following due warning. Students should also note that their UROP will be terminated immediately if they cease to be registered for the following academic year (e.g. by failing in the Tripos examinations).
Exploring the morphogenetic landscape of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition in pancreatic cancer cell lines Project supervisor: Prof Ewa Paluch, PDN, ekp25@cam.ac.uk Co-supervisor: Prof Laura Machesky, Biochemistry, lmm202@cam.ac.uk
Project summary:
This project, funded by the Cambridge Centre for Physical Biology, investigates cell shapes changes during epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition progression in pancreatic cancer. The student intern will work with pancreatic cancer cell lines representing different EMT stages. They will acquire high-resolution 3D confocal images of the cells, segment and quantify cell shapes using computational morphometric pipelines, and map them into morphospace. They will assess whether intermediate EMT states can be distinguished morphologically and explore how shape relates to EMT markers, gaining cross-disciplinary training in imaging, cell biology, and computational modelling.
Project description:
Most cell types in an organism display stable, functionally adapted shapes. Cell shape is determined by cellular mechanics. In animal cells, the balance between internal forces on the plasma membrane, and external stresses controls shape. Tuning this balance drives shape transitions. Shape changes accompany most cellular state/fate transitions during embryonic development, tissue homeostasis and disease progression, such as in cancer. While state transitions have been extensively studied, most investigations focus on changes at the level of biochemical signalling or gene expression. Cell shape changes associated with state changes have received much less attention.
A current research focus in the Paluch lab is to investigate how cell mechanics determines accessible cellular shapes and drives cell shape change during state transitions. To address this question we have developed a cross-disciplinary research programme combining approaches from physics, computational modelling and biology. To study cell shape dynamics, we have developed a morphometric analysis pipeline cellular shapes are quantified through a large number of features, which are then mapped into a low-dimensional “morphospace”. Recently, we have used this approach to investigate epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT)-associated cell spreading. Using morphospace analysis, we demonstrated that the EMT shape change corresponds to a transition from an epithelial to a mesenchymal shape attractor. How cellular mechanics defines the landscape of shape attractors underlying EMT shape changes, and how cell shape and state are coupled are important open questions that remain to be investigated.
Based on gene expression studies, EMT is widely viewed as a transition through a spectrum of states. Cell shape change is a key phenotypic readout of EMT, but whether intermediate states can be distinguished morphologically has not been investigated. We propose a summer studentship project to explore whether intermediate states can be detected at the cell shape level during partial EMT. In collaboration with Laura Machesky’s (LM) lab in the Department of Biochemistry, we will focus on pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) cells, where the extent of EMT progression, and associated metastatic potential, varies across cell lines. LM’s lab has derived PDAC cell lines from pancreatic tumours of KPC (KRasG12D p53R172H Pdx1-Cre) mice, a mouse model where pancreatic cancer is induced by local Pdx1-Cre-driven expression of mutated p53 and KRas. These PDAC cell lines show heterogenous expression of EMT transcription factors and EMT markers (e.g. E-cadherin), indicating that different lines correspond to different stages of EMT progression.
The student intern will work to compare the 3D shapes of cells from two PDAC lines (a more epithelial and a more mesenchymal one). First, the student intern will acquire high resolution 3D images of individual cells labelled with cell border markers (actin or membrane) using laser-scanning confocal microscope (weeks 1-4). The student intern will then use computational analysis pipelines established in the lab to segment the 3D cell shape images and analyse them using our morphometric analysis pipeline (weeks 3-6). The student intern will investigate whether cell shapes in the different lines can be grouped into distinguishable clusters and explore how morphospace position relates to markers of EMT progression (weeks 6-8). Day to day supervision will be provided by three postdoctoral associates, with backgrounds in cell biology, cancer biology and computational modelling, respectively. The student intern will thus receive advanced cross-disciplinary training.
Together, this project will map and compare the cellular shapes associated with successive intermediate states of cancer and deepen our understanding of EMT progression in cancer.
Implementation:
The student intern will work in collaboration between the Paluch lab (Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience) and the Machesky lab (Department of Biochemistry). Day to day supervision will be provided by postdoctoral associates in the labs: Dr Iskra Yanakieva (Paluch lab, experimentalist, EMT), Dr Augusto Borges (Paluch lab, theorist), and Dr Shartuhan Rajput (Machesky lab, experimentalist, PDAC cancer cell lines).
Essential knowledge and requirements:
- Basic knowledge of cell biology.
- Proven interest in cross-disciplinary approaches at the interface of physics and biology or in computational approaches to biology.
- Basic laboratory skills.
- Some experience of programming or experience working with cells will considered an advantage.
Timing
8 weeks, dates flexible from the end of term June 2026.
Application Details
Please email Prof Ewa Paluch ekp25@cam.ac.uk, with a copy of your CV along with a short statement in your email explaining why you are interested in this particular project.
Deadline for applications:
1 May 2026.