Undergraduates engage in diverse research activities and intellectual production opportunities across campus.
This is the College’s Research Roundup—a quarterly news feature that allows us to celebrate the success of these students and their work.
Congratulations to the nearly 300 UChicago students and recent alums who shared their achievements in research at the 2025 UChicago Undergraduate Research Symposium at the David Rubenstein Forum on Friday, April 25.
Nature Reviews Bioengineering announced that third-year Esteban Azagra won “the ultimate bioengineering challenge” of designing an edible vaccine in a low-maintenance plant.
Read more in his journal article that explains this transgenic chloroplast-based system for mRNA vaccine expression in lettuce.
In an update from the Autumn Quarter Roundup, fourth-year Kanchan Naik and second-year Madison Vanderbilt, along with Ph.D. candidate Kelly Wagman, have launched “Water on My Block,” a community-driven app designed to help Chatham residents report and track flooding in real time. Co-created with the Greater Chatham Initiative, the app features privacy conscious mapping, direct links to city services and other tools for civic engagement. By integrating citizen feedback with scientific research, the project seeks to illuminate local environmental injustices and drive policy reform in one of Chicago’s most flood-prone neighborhoods.
Fourth-year Karim Sharaf was recognized for his presentation "The Paucity of Homegrown Arab Research on Arab Crises" at the 2025 Arab Conference at Harvard. Learn more about the conference here.
This April, 12 undergraduate researchers traveled to the 2025 National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) in Pittsburgh, PA. The annual conference provides a unique environment for the celebration and promotion of undergraduate student achievement in research. UChicago participants presented posters and oral presentations on a variety of topics including transit accessibility, aging immigrants in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood and more.
UChicago’s Inside the Lab series gives audiences a first-hand look at the research laboratories and the scholars across campus who are tackling some of the world’s most complex problems. This spring, we interviewed College students working in the labs featured in the series—read more about the work being done in the Sheffield and Awad labs. Thank you to Stacia Konow, John Ponce and Akash Bindal for sharing your experiences doing research on campus!
If you know of a UChicago College student whose research should be recognized, email details to kyoshimoto@uchicago.edu with “Research Roundup” in the subject line.