The Francis Crick Institute

The Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical research institute in Camden, London, beside St Pancras and King's Cross stations. It opened in 2016 as a partnership of the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, Wellcome, University College London, Imperial College London, and King's College London, and is named for Francis Crick. It is a specialist research institute; doctoral students are registered with a partner university while based at the Crick.

Science is organized in interdisciplinary research groups in cancer, infectious disease, immunology, neurobiology, and developmental biology. Students use shared core facilities including genomics, cryo-electron microscopy, and high-containment laboratories. There is no conventional set of undergraduate faculties.

The building houses about 1,500 scientists and support staff, including group leaders, postdoctoral fellows, and on the order of 200 PhD students. A large share of the scientific staff is international. Graduates of the PhD program enter academic laboratories and biomedical companies. The institute's namesake, with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, proposed the double-helix structure of DNA.

Graduate training is a funded four-year PhD, usually with short laboratory rotations before a thesis group is chosen, plus journal clubs and limited coursework. Degrees are awarded by UCL, Imperial, or King's. Students live across London and use the adjoining national and international rail hub; the immediate neighborhood is a dense mix of biomedical institutes, hospitals, and the St Pancras station complex.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, The Francis Crick Institute lists 2 graduate programs in biology, all of them doctoral programs.