This will be Lassonde’s fifth year running the successful Lassonde Undergraduate Research Awards (LURA) program. In 2015, Lassonde was the only Faculty offering internal summer research awards, but since then other Faculties have followed suit. This clearly demonstrates the need for research experience among undergraduate students.
The competition is run together with the National Sciences & Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Undergraduate Student Research Awards (USRA) competition.
What started as a pilot program addressing the need to give undergraduate students research experience is now a popular competition that ends with a professional conference each summer. Check out highlights from last year’s conference at lassondeundergraduateresearch.com/2018.
The LURA is open to qualified students from Lassonde and beyond, including from countries like Costa Rica, Poland and France. Many of the LURA and NSERC USRA graduates who have gone on to conduct research as graduate students acknowledge the important role the NSERC USRA and LURA played in their career choices.
Some have taken the experience and leveraged it into co-op positions, enabling them to advance in an industry setting the following year.
Students looking to gain hands-on research experience in a Lassonde research lab will be busy between now and the Feb. 14 deadline to apply for the LURA and NSERC USRA for the summer of 2019. Students need to identify a professor who will take them under their wing for 16 weeks during the summer months and submit an application for adjudication.
All application procedures are outlined at lassondeundergraduateresearch.com and some, but not all, projects are listed there too. Available projects range from algorithms for satellite rendezvous to microfluidic devices.