The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship has been providing students with the money to complete specialized research projects all over the world since 2001. Every summer, the Office of Undergraduate Research awards a $3,000 stipend to approximately 70 undergraduates to execute a research project of their own design. SURF students are required to complete a minimum of 20 hours of work per week for nine weeks from May through August.
Students from any field of study can apply for a SURF award. Approximately 200 applications are received each year, a majority of which pertain to the natural sciences. Troy Blackburn, associate dean for undergraduate research, said this doesn’t mean that only natural sciences projects get the grant.
“We try to balance the percentage of projects that we fund across the fine arts and humanities, social sciences and natural sciences,” he said.
This year, two-thirds of the grant recipients are pursuing research related to a scientific field, including psychology, biology, chemistry, biomedical engineering and environmental studies.
To decide which research proposals receive a SURF grant, 12 faculty members form four committees that rank the proposals. There is one arts committee and one social sciences committee, but two natural sciences committees because there are so many applications from these majors. Blackburn said that around 60 to 80 projects get the grant each year, depending on the amount of money available.
“We typically spend around $200,000 each year,” he said.
William Booker, a senior psychology and Spanish literature major, is currently researching at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. The project is titled “Depression Contagion among Adolescents: Implications for LGBTQ Teens.”
“My focus is to understand the development of non-suicidal self-injury during adolescence in response to peer victimization, while still learning about contagion on the side,” he said.
