At Penn, undergraduates learn how to be researchers! In support of these efforts and other fellowships, College Houses & Academic Services coordinates one of the only interdisciplinary support programs on campus. Each College House selects a Research Fellow (RF) who is given academic and monetary support to pursue a one-year research project of their own design. As the research project draws to a close, Research Fellows also have opportunity to present their research at our yearly College Houses Research Showcase.
"[The Undergraduate Research Program] is a fantastic program that certainly helped me really develop my proposal and research skills. While guided by both faculty and mentors, it also allows a lot of room to research something that specifically interests you and hone the skills you want to develop. The guidance from the faculty and from mentors is additionally very valuable and they are always there to go to if you need some help."
— Ellie McKeown, 2023-24 Harnwell Research Fellow
Goals of the Program
- To involve more undergraduates in research at all levels and in all disciplines
- To provide instruction on how to put together a fellowship or research proposal
- To increase student contact with faculty inside and outside of the College Houses
- To build intellectual community within and across the Houses
- To give students tools for success that they can use inside and outside of the classroom (not only writing and research, but also public presentation/speaking, interacting with peer researchers, and event planning)
Role of the College House Research Fellow
Every College House RF will serve as a resource to other undergraduates, particularly residents of the House that selected him or her. They will have the responsibility for planning and organizing one or two informal research events for College House residents.
Each individual College House may further define the role of their particular research fellow, who may be asked, for instance, to present their research to other residents, or to help mentor the candidates preparing to apply for the following year's RF position.
Sometime after they are selected, the RFs will receive a short list of dates to hold the following spring semester for dinners and meetings with other College House RFs.
All RFs will work directly with faculty and staff in the College Houses.
Learn about applying for a fellowship
Meet the 2026 CHAS Research Fellows
Below is a list of our current 2026 cohort of student researchers and projects; you can see the variety and breadth of the research done by College House RFs. Representing all four undergraduate schools, the RFs find creative ways to bridge their work to their College House community.
2026 CHAS Research Fellows
| House | Research Fellow | Project Title |
|---|---|---|
| Du Bois | Gurmehr S. Bindra | Improving Speech Accessibility and Clinical Assessment Through AI-Based Stammer Detection |
| Gregory | Adijared Huerta | Environmental Inequality and Everyday Life in Philadelphia's Latino and Black Communities: How much change is possible? |
| Gutmann | Sarah Yang | Tracing the Romantasy Boom: Digitally Mapping Readership of Goodreads' Most Popular Genre |
| Harnwell | Carina Solis | Healing Narratives: The Poetics of Illness and Inequity |
| Harnwell | Vida M. Collado | Children of Divorce: Are they Seeking More or Anticipating Less? |
| Harrison | Camdresa A. Davis | Health and Migration: Jamaican Women's Perspectives on Preventive Care Amid Structural Inequality in the U.S. |
| Harrison | Lara S. Elmanzalawi | Moral Experience Under Criminalization: Personal and Medical Perspectives on Abortion in Egypt |
| Hill | Emily I. Tacey | Maasai self-determination and self-definition: an examination of the social, governmental, political, and temporal factors that have influenced the modes and abilities of the Tanzanian Maasai to self-determine and self-define |
| Kings Court English | Aryaman Tiwary | Predicting the pKa of Ionizable Amphiphilic Janus Dendrimers Using Random Forest Modeling of Local Microenvironments |
| Lauder | Luke Petersen | The Politicization of Teenage Youth and its Subsequent Effects |
| Riepe | Sean N. Shteingart | Reimagining Ritual: How Contemporary Artists Interpret Religion Through Modern Art |
| The Radian | Roopesh Dinakaran | The Groove Advantage: Exploring Natural Differences in Rhythmic Learning |
| Rodin | Nevan Sujit | Technofeudal Power and the Ethics of Algorithmic Decision-Making |
| Rodin | Ayan Sayani | An Analysis of Network Clustering of Intimate Partner Violence Norms in Urban Pakistani Neighborhoods |
| Stouffer | Chenxu (Tommy) Zhang | Mind your "Tone": Lexical Tone Encoding in Mandarin Speech Production |
| Ware | Sydney I. Chen | What Madison Meant: A Corpus-Based Reconstruction of Constitutional Text |