Reasoning Dynamics in Large Language Models – Internship
Cambridge
AstraZeneca is a global, science-led biopharmaceutical business and its innovative medicines are used by millions of patients worldwide. AstraZeneca Summer Internships introduce you to the world of ground-breaking drug development, embedding you in highly dedicated teams, committed to delivering life-changing medicines to patients. Our 10–12-week program is designed for undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students. We offer exciting opportunities across Research & Development, Operations, and Enabling Units (Corporate functions).
Our internships immerse students in the pharmaceutical industry, allowing the opportunity to contribute to our diverse pipeline of medicines whether in the lab or outside of it. You will feel trusted and empowered to take on new challenges, but with all the help and guidance you need to succeed. This internship will help you develop essential skills, expand your knowledge, and build a network that will set you up for future success. You will be surrounded by curious, passionate, and open-minded professionals eager to learn and follow the science, fostering your growth in a truly collaborative and global team.
You will work on a cutting-edge research project investigating how reasoning is represented, structured, and sustained in large language models, a critical capability for long-running scientific analyses, clinical workflows, and multi-step drug discovery tasks. This work directly supports our agentic AI initiatives, where models must perform coherent multi-step reasoning across tools, sessions, and evolving contexts.
The project explores novel approaches to modelling and managing internal reasoning representations in large language models, including how intermediate reasoning can be compactly represented without degrading downstream analytical performance. Your work will help determine how different reasoning structures affect reliability, efficiency, and generalisation across tasks and model architectures.
This is an opportunity to contribute to foundational AI research with immediate practical impact on how we design and deploy reasoning-capable AI systems in healthcare and life sciences.
As part of this internship, you will:
Design and implement architectures that operate on internal representations from large language models to analyse and structure multi-step reasoning behaviour
Conduct experiments to characterise trade-offs between reasoning fidelity, efficiency, and robustness across different task settings
Evaluate reasoning approaches on benchmarks with verifiable outputs (e.g. mathematical, logical, or scientific reasoning tasks), focusing on preservation of functional reasoning capability
Analyse how different reasoning representations influence error propagation and task consistency
AstraZeneca is where you can immerse yourself in groundbreaking work with real patient impact.
Trusted to work on important projects, you’ll have the independence to take on new challenges while receiving all the guidance you need to succeed. Our collaborative environment is designed to help you grow professionally and personally, surrounded by passionate individuals eager to make a difference.
Our mission is to build an inclusive and equitable environment. We want people to feel they belong at AstraZeneca, starting with the recruitment process. We welcome and consider applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of characteristics.
We offer reasonable adjustments/accommodations to help all candidates to perform at their best. If you have a need for any reasonable adjustments/accommodations, please complete the section in the application form.
Ready to make an impact? Apply now and join us on this exciting journey!
Date Posted
30-Jan-2026
Closing Date
13-Feb-2026Our mission is to build an inclusive and equitable environment. We want people to feel they belong at AstraZeneca and Alexion, starting with our recruitment process. We welcome and consider applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of characteristics. We offer reasonable adjustments/accommodations to help all candidates to perform at their best. If you have a need for any adjustments/accommodations, please complete the section in the application form.
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