This will be Lassonde’s fifth year running the successful 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 and Engineering Research Council Undergraduate Student Research Award (NSERC USRA) competition.
What started as a pilot program addressing the need to give undergraduate students research experience, is now a popular competition that ends in a professional conference each summer. Check out highlights from last year’s conference here. (http://www.lassondeundergraduateresearch.com/2018/).
LURA is open to qualified students from Lassonde and beyond including countries like Costa Rica, Poland and France. Many of the LURA and NSERC USRA graduates have gone on to conduct research as graduate students and they acknowledge the important role NSERC USRA and LURA played in their career choices.
Some have taken the experience and leveraged it as co-op positions enabling them to advance in industry setting the following year.
Students looking to gain hands-on research experience in Lassonde research lab will be busy between now and Feb. 14. That is when the deadline is to apply for LURA and NSERC USRA for the summer of 2019. Students need to identify a professor to take them under their wing for 16 weeks during the summer months and submit an application for adjudication.
All application procedures are outlined on the website http://www.lassondeundergraduateresearch.com/ and some, but not all, projects are listed there too. Available projects range from algorithms for satellite rendezvous to microfluidic devices.