Summer Student Scholarships (SS)

Summer Student Scholarships (SS)

Provides paid summer research placements for Irish undergraduates to gain hands-on health research experience in clinical and social care settings.

⚠ This may reflect a past cycle — verify the current call on the funder's site.

The Health Research Board (HRB) Summer Student Scholarships (SS) programme places undergraduate students in paid, supervised health research roles for six to eight consecutive full-time weeks during summer 2026. Awards are valued at €400 per week, yielding a maximum of €3,200 per scholarship. The scheme runs on an annual cycle; the 2026 cohort applications closed on 27 November 2025, with decisions expected in late February 2026 and placements occurring in summer 2026. An SS 2027 cycle is expected to open approximately October 2026.

Eligible students must be enrolled in a health or social care-related discipline at an Irish third-level institution. Students cannot be in their first or final year of an NFQ Level 8 degree, and students on programmes leading directly to Level 9 or 10 qualifications — such as MSc, MPharm, or integrated PhD pathways — cannot be in their final undergraduate year. Students with prior PhD or MSc by research experience are ineligible, as are those who have previously completed eight or more consecutive full-time weeks in a research role. Applications require institutional research office approval before submission through the HRB GEMS portal at grants.hrb.ie.

Projects funded under the scheme must align with one of three HRB strategic research categories: patient-oriented and clinical research, health services research, or population health research. The supervisor or host institution is responsible for identifying the research project and providing the supervised placement environment, while the scholarship supports the student stipend. The scheme is a direct HRB capacity-building investment aimed at exposing pre-career health researchers to hands-on research environments at an early formative stage. Given the modest individual award size, competition focuses on the quality of the proposed placement project and the student's academic standing.