Postgraduate Admissions in the Department of Pathology
Admissions for Michaelmas Term 2025 are now closed. If you are applying for admission in Lent, Easter Term or Michaelmas 2026, you will need to pay an application fee of £50 before you can submit your application unless you are applying for a Doctorate.
1. Identify a potential supervisor
Unless applying for a Departmental studentship, prospective PhD and MPhil students must identify a supervisor who will support your application prior to applying. *The support of a prospective supervisor does not guarantee the applicant a place on the course nor does it guarantee funding. Please see the Research Group Leaders page on the Department of Pathology website for a list of research supervisors.
You are expected to make email contact with those leaders whose research is of interest to you in order to discuss research possibilities, and to determine whether the potential supervisor is able and willing to support your application. When contacting a potential supervisor you are requested to state the degree for which you wish to be considered and provide the following:
- curriculum vitae detailing your academic record
- brief details of your area of interest
Individual members of staff will be pleased to answer informal enquiries about specific research areas, and indeed candidates who are certain of their field of interest are encouraged to contact a potential supervisor at an early stage, to discover whether their research interests match those of the potential supervisor.
There are many reasons that a potential supervisor might not be willing or able to support your application. However, if you receive a positive response to your enquiry and you wish to be considered for funding then you must proceed to step 2 as quickly as possible.
*Getting the support of a prospective supervisor is just the first step in the admissions process and does not automatically guarantee you a place on the course.
2. Submit a formal application
An application is only complete when all supporting documents, including the two academic references, are submitted. It is the applicant's responsibility to ensure their referees submit their references before the closing date.
Full instructions on how to apply online can be found in the Course Directory and the Postgraduate Admissions website.
The online application is required if you:
- wish to apply for University-wide funding competitions (e.g., Gates, Cambridge Overseas & Commonwealth Trusts, Cambridge Home and EU Scholarships, etc.) – N.B. these funding competitions all have very early deadlines
- wish to apply for a specific studentship advertised by the Department of Pathology
- wish to apply for a College studentship
- have an external scholarship (e.g., from your home country)
- have your own funding.
You will need to apply online using the University’s Applicant Portal.
Before submitting an application, please consider the following points:
Are you eligible to apply for admission to our programmes?
Competition for admission to the University of Cambridge postgraduate programme is intense. Like all departments in the Postgraduate School, we require all our postgraduate entrants to have the following:
- at least a high 2.1 in an Honours degree or equivalent in a relevant subject
- in some circumstances, an MSc plus an Honours degree 2.2 class will be a satisfactory qualification
- two outstanding references from senior University staff at your most recent University
- fluency in the English language – recent IELTS test with an overall band score of at least 7.0 with not less than 7.0 in speaking, listening and writing, and 6.5 in reading.
For more details on the University’s academic requirements, see the University’s Postgraduate Admissions.
Which qualification do you want to apply for?
- MPhil BLPAM1 (full-time only)
- MPhil IBaMI
- PhD BLPA22 (full-time or part-time)
What topic do you want to study, and with whom do you want to work? (MPhils or PhD)
The first question requires you to choose a course – for research applicants, this means specifying which department or institute in which you wish to work.
To choose a department, you need to identify a topic and one or more supervisors in that department with whom you wish to work.
If you have not already decided, you should:
- Browse our PIs and visit their personal/group web pages to check the details of their research.
- If there is a possible vacancy, you can explore the possibility that your plans are of interest to them – get in contact with them.
- If you are interested in more than one supervisor within THIS department, you can name them as the first and second choice in your application, but if you want to apply to supervisors in different departments, you will have to make separate applications (one to each department).
Applying for 4-year Programmes
Examples: The Department participates in the 4-year PhD Programmes offered by the BBSRC Doctoral Training Partnership, the Wellcome Trust Programme in Infection & Immunity and the Wellcome Trust/MRC Programme in Stem Cell Biology.
- Refer to the programme for details of the studentship, eligibility criteria, deadlines and how to apply.
- If you are successful, you will then be required to apply for admission to the University using the online Applicant Portal.
- You will not be able to take up the award unless you are also successful in securing admission to the University.
