Find out if research is for you
High schoolers who are curious about research but not yet sure it’s their path, the Science Research Sprint is an 6-week, low-commitment way to find out. You’ll be paired 1:1 with a PhD-completed mentor in your field of interest, not a graduate student, not a hobbyist, and walk through the full arc of a real project: framing a question, grounding it in the literature, designing a method, and producing a written deliverable. Six weeks is long enough to know whether the work energizes you and short enough that the summer still feels like summer. Students leave with a structured research artifact, a mentor who knows their thinking well enough to write or speak to it later, and a clear-eyed answer to the question of whether to go deeper.
Rising Seniors: finish a paper before applications open
For rising seniors, the Sprint is built to land a completed research paper in your hands before the Common App goes live in August. The eight-week timeline is engineered around application season: question and scope locked in June, methodology and analysis through July, written paper finalized by mid-August, in time to reference in essays, supplements, and recommendation conversations. Your mentor works with you on the science and on the artifact admissions readers will actually encounter.
Tracks for Summer 2026 Sprint
For their 1-1 mentoring sessions to do research, students have the option to choose from the following categories:
Microbiology: Investigate the microscopic world driving human health and disease, from antimicrobial resistance and the microbiome to host-pathogen interactions, with a mentor whose PhD work centered on the questions you’ll be asking.
Artificial Intelligence: Build and evaluate modern AI systems; large language models, generative architectures, computer vision pipelines. Produce a paper that grapples with a real open question rather than reproducing a tutorial.
Neuroscience: Examine how the brain encodes, computes, and adapts, with project paths ranging from computational modeling to analysis of published neural datasets, mentored by a researcher trained in the field.
Aeronautics: Work on the physics and engineering of flight, from aerodynamics, propulsion, hypersonics, to flight dynamics, with a mentor whose doctoral research sits inside the discipline you’re exploring.
Medicine: Take on a clinically-grounded research question in areas like translational medicine, epidemiology, or biomedical data analysis, with a mentor who can shape both the science and the framing for a medical audience.
Computer Science: Tackle a focused project in algorithms, systems, theory, or applied CS, ending with a paper that demonstrates real technical depth rather than a polished demo.
Electrical & Electronics Engineering: Explore circuits, signals, embedded systems, or power and communications engineering through a project scoped to fit eight weeks without sacrificing technical seriousness.
Physics & Mechanical Engineering: Pursue a question in classical or computational physics, mechanics, or engineering design. From finite element analysis to experimental modeling, with a mentor trained in the discipline.
Faculty you will work with
