Are there any/many awards for current PhD students in a molecular biology discipline, particularly cancer biology in the UK?

Loads. Despite all the cuts, science has been relatively protected, and cancer biology is very well funded. As for which unis - cancer biology is often so closely linked to fundamental cell biology that pretty much any university with a cell biology/molecular biology department will have some cancer-related research going on, as will any uni with a medical school. It's competitive though, because more people are choosing academia as the jobs dry up...

Thanks 4matt. I was enquiring about competitions for work completed during the course or shortly after completing a PhD as opposed to the prize of actually getting a PhD position .:-)

Virtually every postdoc I see in my field is for cancer research or molecular biology... so I'd imagine there are lots of PhD opportunities for those areas too :-)

Oops, didn't read your next post. I don't know about awards like that, sorry :-(