Start your research today

How did you get into your research lab?

• I simply emailed Professor James Nowick expressing my interest in his research, particularly his antibiotic related project, and attached my resume. Professor Nowick reached back out to me and scheduled a meeting between me and a graduate student in his lab. The fit was right, and the rest is history!

What task or responsibilities do you execute in your lab?

• I perform solid phase peptide synthesis, small molecule synthesis, as well as the associated analytical and purification techniques associated with them. Including, preparative HPLC, flash column chromatography, HNMR, ESI-MS, etc.. I work on a project rather independently, and must maintain documentation of my work via a lab notebook.

What did you gain from joining a research lab?

• I have gained invaluable laboratory skills/experience that will be applicable to my future graduate studies as well as industry afterwards. Furthermore, I have actively endured the research design process and tribulations that I believe have mentally prepared me for what's next to come in pursuing a PhD. 

Any stories or highlights from your research experience you'd like to share?

• Professor Nowick hosts Thanksgiving dinner at his house and invites the lab to his house where we all have a great time!
  
  

How did you get into your research lab?

• UCI Bio Sci Students have an open Bio Sci Discord that any UCI student can join. There is a channel called "research-promo-opportunites" where students can promote their lab or organization.
  
  In Fall of my 2nd year, I was scrolling through that channel and spotted a message of a student saying that their lab was looking for students. I DM'd the person for more information. After learning more about it, I was sure it was a lab that I wanted to join. They gave me the email of the lab assistant and the PI and told me to send them an email + resume. About a month later I received an email saying I got an interview. I made sure to prep for potential questions and dress up. A couple weeks after the interview I got an email saying I can start research the beginning of my Winter quarter.

What task or responsibilities do you execute in your lab?

• My role in the lab is Histology. In Histology we stain slides using either Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining or Immunofluorescence (IFA). Both help researchers identify different types of cells and tissues using different colored dye and fluorescent dyes respectively.

What did you gain from joining a research lab?

• I have never worked in a lab setting before this lab, and through it I have learned so much. I have learned how to operate lab equipment, how to write research proposals (and hopefully papers in the future), how to carry out protocols, and more. These are skills you don't learn in a lecture hall or in a classroom. Different environments lead to different skills to be learned.

Any stories or highlights from your research experience you'd like to share?

• We hosted a "Labsgiving" where all lab personal and undergrad students brought some food over to share.
  
  

How did you get into your research lab?

• My Political Science professor Matthew Beckmann reached out to a group of 10 students and started off as a Summer Research project where we focused on studying presidential legacies and political memory (examining how presidents’ “legacies” are constructed through recurring historical episodes (e.g., “Nixon’s China diplomacy” or “Bush’s Iraq War”). I was drawn to the project because it connected closely to my interests in American political systems, historical narratives, and how political meaning is shaped over time.

What task or responsibilities do you execute in your lab?

• Essentially we have weekly tasks where we extract and catalog presidential "episodes" from scholarly biographies of different presidents (for example, this week I am focusing on President Nixon), using different research and/or AI tools. I verify outputs against the original texts to ensure accuracy, identify missing episodes, and refine results through structured prompting. I then organize findings into standardized Google Sheets and Excel datasets for cross-presidential comparison, evaluate model performance, and submit cleaned data to a shared research drive while maintaining strict source-based organization.

What did you gain from joining a research lab?

• Working on this research exposed me to the full scholarly process, from source collection to data construction and analysis. I gained hands-on experience working with academic texts, building structured datasets, even evaluating AI as a research tool, and maintaining methodological discipline. It has also sharpened my critical thinking, collaboration, and project-management skills, and deepened my understanding of how political narratives, historical memory, and presidential legacies are constructed. Overall, it helped me bridge theoretical political science with applied research.

Any stories or highlights from your research experience you'd like to share?

• Something really fun for me was when our research group was getting the opportunity to help turn our project into a UROP proposal. A few of us worked with Prof. Beckmann to expand our research into a year-long Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project and apply for the Research Experience Fellowship. It was exciting to see our summer work evolve into a larger, funded research initiative with plans for continued collaboration, a fellowship, and the chance to present at the UROP Symposium in May.
  
  

How did you get into your research lab?

• Looking into BioSci 199 dashboard and finding the labs with topics I was interested in. For me, that was oncology, so I found my lab through reading about the research which was actually about robot assisted surgery! Since I am pre-med I was quite interested in this lab since it also allowed me to lead my own project and publish multiple papers by the time I am done with undergrad. I cold emailed the professor, who then set up a time to do an interview and talk about research projects he is currently working on.

What task or responsibilities do you execute in your lab?

• Writing/drafting documents such as IRB, abstract/methods, designing the experiment, working with collaborators to obtain qualitative data from UCI patients, coding data, assisting with various other tasks and projects other lab members are working on.

What did you gain from joining a research lab?

• Learning how to write research papers, publishing, understanding the research process and approvals, etc.
  
  

The Claire Trevor School of the Arts encourages dynamic practices across the four departments of Art, Dance, Drama and Music. School-level entities including the Institute for 21st Century Creativity (21C), Beall Center for Art + Technology and Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL) offer opportunities for faculty and students from different departments to collaborate and engage in interdisciplinary exploration. In addition, CTSA hosts several department level entities and individual faculty led labs.

Undergraduates in the School of Biological Sciences have the opportunity to perform supervised undergraduate research alongside a mentor while getting graded units in research through Bio Sci 199. The Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences believes that successful participation in creative research is one of the highest academic goals its undergraduates can attain. Approximately 1,000 students are enrolled in and conduct experimental laboratory, field, or clinical research as an apprentice scientist under the supervision of a professor in one of the more than 250 laboratories in the Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences or the School of Medicine.

The Merage School is a research institution led by renowned thought leaders in the fields of accounting, economics, finance, information technology, marketing, operations and decision technologies, organization and management and strategy. Our distinguished faculty tackle a broad range of global business topics—many of which address disruption, the role of new technologies and what it means to lead in a digitally-driven world.

The field of Education Sciences is exciting because it draws from so many different perspectives. Investigation in Education Sciences involves research using a wide range of methodological practices and research designs, and yielding a variety of data.

Today’s global complexities demand new approaches to training tomorrow’s engineers. At the Samueli School, hands-on experience and participation in research play a key role in educating undergraduate students.

There are various opportunities and programs available to support Humanities undergraduates interested in pursuing research at UC Irvine and within the School.

ICS faculty and students explore computing across a remarkable range of research areas, shedding light to the theoretical foundations of computing models, expanding the frontiers of artificial intelligence and data science, advancing the performance, security, and energy efficiency of computer systems, enabling discovery in science and engineering, experimenting with new modalities for human-machine interaction, and promoting accessible information technologies for equity and social justice. Leveraging a large and diverse network of collaborators on-campus and around the globe, they help reshape domains as far reaching as education, art and entertainment, business and law, health care and medicine, biological systems, and the environment.

Undergraduate students in the UC Irvine School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences have extensive research opportunities, including working in faculty members’ labs, writing journal articles and getting published, presenting at conferences, and participating in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)!

Research interests that our students are able to explore include synthetic biology, RNA and disease, medicinal chemistry, molecular evolution, therapeutics for childhood cancer, bioengineered tools for drug delivery, and anti-aging and health.

We offer a summer internship that allows students to experience pharmacy in the hospital setting! During this 10-week program that is exclusive to PharmSci majors, interns shadow pharmacists at the UCI Medical Center in Orange, CA.

Learn more about research opportunities with the School of Physical Sciences, including the AMPS (Anteater Mentoring in Physical Sciences) program, which connects current undergraduate students with business and science professionals.

In Orange County and beyond, Wen Public Health is committed to serving diverse communities through research, education and public service. Community-engaged research tackles real-life challenges informed by key stakeholders and is one of many research areas that Wen Public Health faculty are using to address health disparities.

The faculty pursue knowledge production and dissemination in the service of fostering informed social action as they address issues ranging from global poverty to prison overcrowding, from gang violence to healthy child development, from health risks to community empowerment. The School is an internationally recognized pioneer in developing interdisciplinary approaches to social problems that encourage flexibility and independent thinking among faculty and students and nourish collaboration across different fields and with people of many different experiences.

Learn more about our pursuit of science that drives solutions to social and environmental problems.

Undergraduates interested in research at UC Irvine and within the School of Social Sciences have a number of available opportunities and programs to support their endeavors. The highlighted programs at the link below are school-sponsored programs that elevate advanced research and inquiry within social sciences.

Centers and Institutes at UC Irvine provide a mechanism and organizational structure for collective—and often convergent—research activities that are fundamentally different from those that typically occur within individual schools or departments.