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Pioneering discoveries by students

While working with and learning from faculty at the forefront of today’s most exciting breakthroughs in all disciplines, Yale undergraduates have discovered new species, created new technologies, developed and patented new products, and co-authored original research.

Yale research changing the world

Yale researchers recently tested the possibility that a single vaccine could tackle both Zika and the West Nile Virus. Yale physicists discovered a time crystal that “ticks” upon exposure to an electromagnetic pulse, and Yale scholars of Architecture and Forestry collaborated with the UN to design an Ecological Living Module.

Extraordinary resources, available to all

To inspire original research, Yalies have access to a dazzling collection of unique resources at their fingertips including the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design , the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library , the Brain Imaging Center , the Peabody Museum of Natural History , the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments , the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art . 

Summer research fellowships awarded to first-year students

Undergraduate science majors who do research with faculty.

$1 Million+

Funding for undergraduate science research fellowships annually

Science, math, and engineering labs at Yale College and the graduate and professional schools.

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Real research in the first year

First-year students can begin conducting original research by using a Yale College First-Year Summer Research Fellowship that provides support for a summer research experience in the sciences and/or engineering under the supervision of a Yale faculty member. More than 100 such fellowships are set aside for first-year students.

Diversity in the sciences

Since 1995, Yale’s nationally recognized STARS (Science, Technology and Research Scholars) Program has promoted diversity in the sciences through mentoring, academic year study groups, and an original research-based summer program for students in their first and second years. Juniors and seniors have the opportunity to continue their research through the STARS II Program.

A team from the Yale Undergraduate Aerospace Association was chosen by NASA as one of sixteen across the country whose CubeSat research satellites will be flown into space as auxiliary payloads on upcoming space missions. Yale’s Bouchet Low-Earth Alpha/Beta Space Telescope (BLAST) will map the distribution of galactic cosmic radiation, providing insight into the origins of the universe.

Department of Psychology

You are here, what undergraduate research opportunities are available.

There are many, many undergraduate research opportunities available to you! Most psychology laboratories at Yale have opportunities for undergraduates to get involved. Some labs take on undergraduates during the academic year either for academic credit, for pay (through work-study program, etc.) or on a volunteer basis. Some labs will also hire undergraduate research assistants (RAs) full-time over the summer break.

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eCLOSE Undergraduate Bridge to Research

Undergraduate Bridge to Research is an intensive immersion into research, modeled on the format of a graduate school rotation. Participants (rising high school seniors through undergraduates) conduct a genetic screen to identify diet-derived or other ingestible compounds that affect driver mutations of diseases such as diabetes, cancer, neurodegeneration, and even viral infection and then develop fully independent projects to address key questions focused on the health disparities within their own families or communities. The program is comprised of 3 phases:

During Phase I: boot camp, students learn critical lab techniques, including using a balance, pipetting, dilutions, creating solutions needed for the experimental program, basic fly husbandry, connections of genotype and phenotype, and setting up the genetic screen described above.

In Phase II: Independent research, students build independent projects using a series of menus to hone their interests into feasible, fundable new projects. Techniques span fly behavior, biochemistry, molecular biology, and cell biology, all of which have been adapted to be used in an at-home environment. The goal of Phase II is for students to find their "science soul" and establish research interests that will be lasting throughout their careers.

In Phase III: Students present the results of their work in short oral presentations. Even if you do not send students this year, please plan to participate in the presentation day on August 11! It's mind blowing every year.

eCLOSE Undergraduate Bridge is conducted using a virtual hybrid format. Students receive fully equipped research stations in the mail, set up research labs in their homes or dorms, and gain instruction and support from eCLOSE experts via Zoom. To date, over 75% of eCLOSE UG Bridge participants have moved on to paid fellowships in research labs, with one student so far matriculating in a Ph.D. program at Thomas Jefferson University. There are no restrictions for participation- we welcome all demographics, cultures, and ideas, with the goal of mixing different backgrounds to create completely novel and synergistic research projects. We are working to secure funding to ensure equity, so please encourage all students to apply. If your university is interested in sponsoring students, we are more than happy to talk about that. So far, two universities have committed to sponsoring, which is fantastic and helps us ensure support for anyone who needs it. We are also happy to support efforts to attain local funding and have successfully helped multiple institutions acquire funding to support their students' participation. Whatever it takes to get kids research experiences, we are all in!

Apply for the eCLOSE Bridge to Research>>

Yale BioMed Amgen Scholars Program: Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)

Each summer the Yale BioMed Amgen Scholars Program brings a group of qualified undergraduates to Yale for eight weeks. The experience is meant to familiarize students with the kind of work they can expect to do in graduate school, provide them with insight into the many steps involved in building a career based on PhD level training, as well as foster a sense of confidence regarding their own abilities and potential.

The focus of the program is primarily on research and on the methods of professional research. Students in the natural sciences learn advanced laboratory methods and conduct PhD level research in state-of-the-art laboratory facilities. Students in the humanities and social sciences work closely with mentors and have at their disposal the considerable archival resources found in the Yale University libraries.

The American Cancer Society (ACS) Center for Diversity in Cancer Research (DICR) Training

Neuroscience | Undergraduate Major

Research opportunities.

We encourage all neuroscience majors to conduct research during the semester and over the summer, whether as part of courses (470/471 and 490/491), as a volunteer, or as employment (e.g., work-study). There are more than 100 neuroscientists on campus with whom to work, and we encourage you to explore their labs’ websites, read a journal article or two, and reach out to them to discuss opportunities. We also post specific opportunities sent our way here, in reverse chronological order.

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Department of Physics

You are here, undergraduate research.

The 2023 undergraduate research “fair” is scheduled for November 10, 2023, at 3:30pm in the SPL 3rd Floor Lounge (and hallway). Please submit your information below.

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Minors and visiting undergraduates participating in research or clinical activities

April 24, 2024

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Yale undergraduate research, tech tools and human values: conference explores ai’s impact in government.

A recent Yale conference explored the latest research on how government uses technology to guide decision making and how to ensure its responsible use.

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Innovating circuits and devices with time and space: from biodegradable electronics to implosive optics

Quansan Yang, MIT

Tuesday, May 7 - 11:15am

DL 514 or Zoom ( https://yale.zoom.us/j/99922689338 )

Hosted by Hong Tang

The development of circuits and devices that seamlessly adapt to dynamic biological and ecological environments is crucial for advancing human and environmental healthcare. In this talk, I will explore the concepts of dynamic adaptability in these device systems, and explain their potential to address grand societal challenges. First, I will introduce a biodegradable electronic device designed to function as medicine, effectively mitigating drug overdose side effects and alleviating nerve pain on-demand within clinically relevant timeframes. Second, I will discuss the engineering innovations in device functionalities and manufacturing approaches (e.g., the development of the first biodegradable micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and advancements in scalable, high-speed laser manufacturing techniques) to accelerate the deployment of biodegradable electronics into everyday life. Third, I will present strategies for the volumetric and simultaneous deposition of diverse functional materials in a 3D, ‘arbitrary’, and nanoprecise manner, exemplified by creating 3D optical chips and ultra-compact visible-light all-optical neural networks for medical imaging.

Quansan Yang is a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, working in the labs of Prof. Edward S. Boyden and Prof. Peter T.C. So. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2021, working with Prof. John A. Rogers. Previously, he obtained his B.S. degree from Tsinghua University in 2016. He actively collaborates with industrial companies, including Fujikura and Edwards Lifesciences, to emphasize the societal impacts of his research. He has been named on MIT Technology Review’s Global Innovators Under 35 list and on Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Science.

Wright Laboratory

Exploring the invisible universe, npa seminar: lawrence lee, the university of tennessee, knoxville, “what to do when nature is unnatural”.

Particle physics is now in an era where discovery will require thoughtful exploration, looking for highly motivated signatures that have, for one reason or another, failed our experimental searching. Beyond the notable discovery of the Higgs Boson, the LHC otherwise has not rewritten textbooks, despite all indications that there are new phenomena to be discovered. This talk will discuss some of those motivations and a few promising research thrusts that should lead to some answers to the Standard Model’s mysteries. These will range from long-lived particle signatures, R-parity violating supersymmetry, and the future of higher energy colliders.

Host: Reina Maruyama

Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology

Vivian irish elected 2023 fellow of the aaas.

Vivian Irish was recently elected as a 2023 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as a Fellow honors members whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications in service to society have distinguished them among their peers and colleagues.

For more information, visit the  2023 AAAS Fellows  website.

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In the Early Steps of Cancer Formation, Timing Matters

By the time cancer is diagnosed, a lot has already happened behind the scenes. Although cancers are classed into early and late stages for clinical purposes, even an “early” stage tumor is the result of many previous, undetectable cellular and molecular changes in the body.

Now, scientists at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and their collaborators have caught a detailed glimpse of some of those earliest changes, using powerful, high-resolution microscopy to track the very first cancer-triggering physical changes in mouse skin cells.

Understanding these early events could be helpful for us to actually design approaches to prevent the eventual formation of cancer. Tianchi Xin, PhD

By studying mice that carry a cancer-promoting mutation in their hair follicles, the scientists found that the earliest signs of cancer formation happen at a precise time and place in the growth of the hair follicles of the mouse skin cells. Further, they found that those precancerous changes can be blocked with a kind of drug known as an MEK inhibitor.

The team, led by Tianchi Xin, PhD , research scientist in genetics at YSM; Valentina Greco, PhD , Carolyn Walch Slayman Professor of Genetics at YSM and member of the Yale Cancer Center and Yale Stem Cell Center; and Sergi Regot, PhD, associate professor of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, published its results April 30 in the journal Nature Cell Biology .

The scientists studied mice that develop cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, the second most common type of human skin cancer. These mice were genetically engineered with a cancer-promoting mutation in a gene called KRAS, which is among the most commonly mutated oncogenes in human cancers. KRAS mutations have also been found to drive lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and colorectal cancer, among others.

The early change that the scientists studied — the growth of a tiny, abnormal bump in the hair follicle — is classified as a pre-cancerous abnormality. “Understanding these early events could be helpful for us to actually design approaches to prevent the eventual formation of cancer,” said Xin, who was first author on the study.

Although their study focused on skin cancer, the researchers believe the principles they discovered are likely to apply to the many other kinds of cancer driven by KRAS mutations because the basic genes and proteins involved are the same across different tumors.

Not just cell proliferation

As in humans, mouse hair follicles continually grow, shedding old hairs and forming new ones. Stem cells, which hold the capacity to develop into many other kinds of cells, drive much of this renewal cycle. Previous studies had found that KRAS mutations drive an increase in stem cell proliferation in hair follicles, and it was assumed this significant increase in the number of stem cells was responsible for the precancerous tissue disruption.

To test this assumption, the team used a specially engineered form of mutated KRAS that they could switch on at a specific time in the animals’ hair follicle skin cells. Xin and his colleagues used a microscopy method known as intravital imaging, whose name refers to the technique’s ability to image cells at high resolution in a living animal, and to label and follow individual stem cells in the animals. When the KRAS mutation was triggered, all the stem cells proliferated faster, but the pre-cancerous bump only formed in one specific place in the hair follicle and in one stage in the growth cycle, meaning that the overall higher number of cells was likely not the whole story.

Switching on the KRAS mutation in hair follicles led the stem cells to proliferate faster, change their migration patterns, and divide in different directions from cells without the cancer-promoting mutation.

The mutation acts on a downstream protein known as ERK. Xin was able to observe real-time ERK activity in individual stem cells in live animals and discovered a specific change in that protein’s activity triggered by the KRAS mutation. The researchers were also able to stop the formation of the pre-cancerous bump using an MEK inhibitor, which blocks ERK’s activity. The drug halted the mutation’s effects on migration and cell orientation, but not on overall stem cell proliferation, implying that formation of the pre-cancerous condition is due to these first two changes, rather than to enhanced cell proliferation.

Precancer in context

Tracking the effects of an oncogenic mutation in real time, in a living animal, is the only way the researchers were able to uncover these principles. That is important because cancer does not form in a vacuum — it is highly dependent on its microenvironment to grow and sustain itself. The scientists also needed to track not only the behavior of individual cells, but the molecules within those cells.

“The way we’ve approached understanding these oncogenic events is really to connect across scale,” Greco said. “The framework and approaches Dr. Xin used in collaboration with Dr. Regot allowed us to go down to molecular elements while connecting them to the scale of the cell and the tissue, in a way that gives us a resolution to these events that’s so difficult to do outside a living animal.”

Next, the researchers want to track the process for a longer time to see what happens after that initial bump forms. They also want to look at other cancer-promoting events like inflammation to see if the principles they discovered apply in other contexts.

Featured in this article

• Valentina Greco, PhD Carolyn Walch Slayman Professor of Genetics
• Tianchi Xin, PhD Research Scientist in Genetics

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Institution for Social and Policy Studies

Advancing research • shaping policy • developing leaders, from tech tools to human values: isps conference explores the impact of ai in government.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not the future of government. In many ways, it’s happening now.

Government officials increasingly use AI and data-driven algorithms to influence critical choices, ranging from determining the distribution of food assistance and parole decisions to selecting targets for tax audits and planning the routes for police patrols.

“As AI algorithms become more powerful and impactful, so does the realization that we are facing a major change that touches on the very core of what makes us a democracy, namely the way that we make public decisions,” said Shir Raviv , a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University and a nonresident fellow with Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies’ Democratic Innovations program. “It raises some urgent and timely questions about how to unlock the potential value of using AI to improve government decisions and processing while maintaining democratic values and human rights.”

Raviv organized a one-day conference at ISPS last week to explore the latest research on how government uses technology to guide decision making and what might be done to ensure it is used responsibly.

The conference included presentations from Kirk Bansak of the University of California, Berkeley on refugee integration; Virginia Eubanks of the University at Albany, State University of New York on automating caregiving; and Kaylyn Jackson Schiff of Purdue University on citizen perceptions of AI in policing.

Further discussions focused on AI in the criminal justice system, introducing new frameworks to assess the risks and benefits of AI, including presentations by Melody Huang of Harvard University on whether AI helps humans make better decisions; Dasha Pruss of Harvard University on judicial resistance to a recidivism risk assessment instrument; and Eddie Yang of the University of California, San Diego on ethnic discrimination in AI-assisted criminal sentencing in China.

Other presentations discussed the politics involved in using AI in government. Baobao Zhang of Syracuse University shared survey evidence from machine learning and AI researchers on the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence. Daniel Schiff of Purdue University focused on the viewpoints of policymakers and legislators. And Raviv examined the public’s reaction to AI.

ISPS Director Alan Gerber , Sterling Professor of Political Science, moderated an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion on the promise and challenges of ensuring responsible AI in government, featuring ISPS faculty fellow and Democratic Innovations co-coordinator Hélène Landemore , a political scientist specializing in non-electoral forms of government representation who is co-leading a three-year project on the ethics of AI; Yale political science Ph.D. candidate Eliza Oak , who researches innovations in technology and democracy; Savannah Thais of Columbia University, a physicist who develops responsible and trustworthy machine learning; and Suresh Venkatasubramanian of Brown University, a professor of computer science and data science who was the co-author of the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights — one of the first significant actions taken by the Biden-Harris administration to regulate AI.

“We are thrilled to have Shir as an active member of our community at ISPS,” Gerber said. “Her forward-thinking research and success in gathering such an impressive group of scholars to explore the political implications of new technologies demonstrate the guiding principles of our Democratic Innovations program.”

Democratic Innovations aims to identify and test new ideas for improving the quality of democratic representation and governance.

“Though these systems promised to lower administrative barriers to programs to allow people to claim benefits from their cell phones or from the comfort of their own homes, in reality, the systems tend to work best for those people who are least vulnerable.”

And because new automated decisions reduce the need for frontline caseworkers, fewer people receive the support they are seeking, Eubanks said.

“These systems end up working really badly for folks who are particularly vulnerable,” she said. “There is less hands-on help. These are the very people who public benefits programs are supposed to be helping.”

Pruss, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and an Embedded EthiCS postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, presented her research showing criminal judges in Pennsylvania ignoring a new tool intended to help sentencing decisions through evidence-based risk assessment. She argued that policymakers should be wary when presented with a new instrument advertised as evidence based.

“In evidence-based sentencing, the term ‘evidence based’ carries a lot of political authority, but that label gets used in a fairly misleading way because sentencing decisions are being grounded in past arrest or conviction data, which are inherently biased,” Pruss said. “It’s called evidence based, but there is no evidence about what actually happens in the future when the tools get implemented on the ground.”

But Pruss did not dismiss the utility of AI or algorithms to help build a more just world. She said policymakers should frame the intention of a technological tool in criminal justice based on the human values they seek to uphold.

“What outcomes are considered important to predict?” she said. “Somebody’s risk of reconviction? Or is it more important to predict, say, which judges are going to be making the most discriminatory decisions? Should we use data to incarcerate more people who are at higher risk of committing more crimes or use evidence to allocate extra resources to people who really need it?”

In concluding her presentation, Eubanks echoed other participants at the conference on what she considered the central question facing a society drifting quickly into automation.

“We need to center human dignity,” she said. “We need to make the labor of love visible.”

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One yale student’s love languages: mandarin, greek, and particle physics.

Zemenu presented his research at the American Physical Society division of nuclear physics meeting in New Orleans in 2022. (Credit: Shelly Lesher)

The imperceptible forces that push, pull, and pass through the universe have clearly tugged at Barkotel Zemenu a time or two. Or 10.

Four years ago, Zemenu entered the vortex of Yale undergraduate life with a passion to study history. Perhaps he might teach it someday, he thought. Instead, he emerges this spring as a promising particle physicist who has already contributed to cutting-edge research and interned at an international physics project in Germany and at a premiere astrophysics institute in Israel.

Zemenu has gone from crabbing about the undergraduate foreign language requirement to enthusiastically developing a knowledge of Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin, and Greek, in addition to English and Amharic, his native language; he’s traveled across the United States to academic conferences, giving high-level physics presentations on neutrinoless beta double decay; he’s even found the time to co-teach a class for middle schoolers on the meaning of life.

Not bad for a guy who spent his first year as a Yalie doing middle-of-the-night Zoom classes from a hotel lobby — where the wifi was stronger than at his parents’ house — in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

“ So many of these things were unexpected, but I’m grateful for all the pivots,” he said, basking in the afternoon sun from a bench outside Pauli Murray College, a frequent stopping place between his physics home base at Wright Lab and his dorm room at Hopper College. “I had not expected college to be a place where I pivoted so much.”

Zemenu picked Yale after participating in Yale Young Global Scholars, a summer program that brings American and international high school students together and introduces them to the Yale campus. But then came Zemenu’s first pivot.

He spent his first year of college living in Ethiopia with his parents, after the COVID-19 pandemic led Yale to make all classes remote as a public safety measure. In those early days, Zemenu would set an alarm for the middle of the night, take a cab to a nearby hotel with a strong wifi connection, and dial into his online classes from the hotel lobby. He became such a frequent visitor that the hotel’s employees would recognize him and leave him alone to work undisturbed.

“ It was just business as usual,” he said. “Now, any time I find myself complaining about the walk up Science Hill, I remind myself what a luxury it is to be here, in person.”

Once Zemenu got to New Haven, the pivots began to pile up. He leaned into physics, particularly the unseen world of dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay — a theoretical nuclear process that, if proven, could shake up the Standard Model of Physics.

He also delved into the writings of revered 20 th century physicist Richard Feynman, and a biography of 19 th century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Zemenu came to the notion that it would be valuable to have one area of deep expertise that is informed by a broad range of studies. He chose physics as his deep dive.

“ We’ve been lucky to have Barkotel as a member of our research group over the past three years, where he’s been studying detector technologies aimed at figuring out why there is matter, rather than antimatter, in the universe,” said David Moore, an associate professor of physics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “In addition to his packed academic schedule and leadership activities in the department, Barkotel has been a key contributor to our research.

“ While we are sad to see him go, we are looking forward to seeing his many accomplishments in the future.”

Zemenu spent part of a summer at the Weizmann Institute of Science, near Tel Aviv, where he wrote a 20-page white paper on his research developing a novel program to automate the identification of variable stars from a telescope image. He spent part of another summer in Germany, at the Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology, where he studied quantum gravity. He’s also attended science conferences in New Orleans, Honolulu, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis.

Meanwhile, his list of honors grew along with his frequent flier miles: the Jocelyn Bell Outstanding Leadership Scholarship, the Sigma Pi Sigma Leadership Scholarship, a Rosenfeld Science Scholar award, an American Physical Society Top Presenter award.

“ I remain extremely interested in this idea of dark matter and dark energy,” he said. “We don’t know what the majority of the matter in the universe is actually made of. We’ve quantified it, but we don’t know what it is. That’s a question I’d like to see answered in our lifetime.”

While open to pivoting yet again, Zemenu intends to pursue that question after leaving Yale and entering graduate school at Stanford. He’ll also pursue a more recent passion: accessing the deeper, more meaningful interactions that emerge when you communicate with people in their native language.

Much to his surprise, he discovered at Yale that he has a great facility for reading, writing, and speaking other languages. He’s written poetry in Hebrew, for instance, and shared a laugh with a family member of a friend by explaining, in Chinese, that his preferred level of spice is “scared of not-spicy food.”

“ Speaking to someone in their own language opens a different door to aspects of themselves that you won’t learn about otherwise,” Zemenu said. “That was the part about languages I hadn’t realized. It isn’t purely academic. It’s about relationships.”

That may be his biggest pivot of all, he said.

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