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 an 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
We are not currently accepting Research Fellow applications. Thank you.
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 2025 CHAS Research Fellows
Below is a list of our current 2025 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.
2025 CHAS Research Fellows
| House | Research Fellow | Project Title |
|---|---|---|
| Du Bois | Clarke Dickens | East Africans in Türkiye: A Look Into The Past |
| Fisher Hassenfeld | Chloe Furst | Investigating the Tensiometry of Lung Surfactant |
| Gregory | Helen Liu | Combating careerism: can raising awareness and participating in collaborative activities help decrease careerism in individuals? |
| Gutmann | Davidi Tawfiles | Reducing Health Disparities Among Philadelphia’s Youth by Improving Health Literacy |
| Harnwell | Nicholas Harty | AstroLab for Medical Devices and Wearables Lab |
| Harnwell | Tjaden Litwiler | Exploring the intersection of live arts, emotional growth, and healthcare innovation |
| Harrison | Pranavi Kondam | Prayers and Protocols: An Analysis of Religion in Prime-Time TV |
| Harrison | Pulkith Paruchuri | A Generative Adversarial-Driven Dual-Temperature Large Language Model Architecture for Truth-Grounded Response Synthesis |
| Hill | Gary (Zhutian) Gao | Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Models for Classifying Archaeological Fragments. |
| Kings Court English | Diemmy Dang | Religion’s Role in the Identity, Assimilation, and Community Building of Vietnamese Refugees in Philadelphia |
| Lauder | Omar El Nesr | Deep Learning for Full-Body Cross-Modality Synthesis between CT and PET Imaging |
| Riepe | Vanessa Greenwald | Investigating the Effects of Media Use on Adolescent and Young Adult Mental Health |
| The Radian | Keanu Natan | Analyzing the influence of Pacific Marine and Coastal Bioacoustics on the development of Aboriginal Songlines |
| Rodin | Veronica Baladi | Piloting Community Fridges in Schools: To what extent can an urban school community fridge complement school lunch? |
| Rodin | Maria Balhara | Escaping Homelessness: Pathways to a Future Where It is Brief and Nonrecurring |
| Stouffer | Elayna Rinker | Evaluating educational solutions to increase awareness that natural redheads require more anesthetics and analgesics |