We welcome PhD placement students to learn from our experts and make real contributions to our work at Kew Gardens in London or Wakehurst in Sussex.
We regularly host external PhD students for 3-month placements across a range of our areas of work, including communications, outreach, interpretation, collections and science. Placements with Kew are a fantastic way to develop your skills, build your networks, and work with a renowned scientific and public-facing institution.
If you have the opportunity to take on a Professional Internship for PhD Students (PIPS), or any other externally funded placement or internship as part of your PhD, we’d love to hear from you no matter your discipline!
How does it work?
Placements are usually 3 months and there are various options for onsite, hybrid and remote working. Please note that Kew cannot cover travel, accommodation or other expenses and therefore these placements are only suitable for students whose doctoral programme includes placement funding.
Occasionally, we advertise discrete, predefined projects that have a deadline for applications and are completed in a specified timeframe, which will be highlighted below.
Most often, though, we advertise areas of Kew that are open to hosting PhD students. Below you will find suggestions of placements that you could do at any time of the year.
There is sometimes subsidised onsite accommodation at Wakehurst but not at Kew.
What might I work on?
We encourage you to look for a placement that might be out of your comfort zone and different to what you usually do in your PhD research to get the most out of this experience. There is a range of possible opportunities across a range of departments at Kew with some offering things that you might not expect. Most opportunities are open to students from a variety of disciplines from science to arts and humanities. Placements have been created with the aim of giving experiences outside of academia, usually in a desk-based environment.
The selection of teams who are open to hosting PhD placement students:
- Public Programmes
- Communications and Policy Work
- Science
- Collections and interdisciplinary work
Click on the links to see more information about the placements that are currently available.
How to apply:
If you are interested in applying for any of these placements, please send your CV and a 500-word statement of interest to sciencetraining@kew.org with the name of the placement and the name of your lead contact or supervisor from your university or DTP. We operate a quarterly application window for all placements unless otherwise stated; the next deadline for applications is 31 July 2025.
Please see our privacy policy. If you have any questions about a specific placement, please contact the relevant placement host.