Summer Science Returns
Annual undergraduate internship program gets underway
Bar-Ilan University warmly welcomes 26 undergraduate students from the United States and Argentina who are participating in the tenth annual Summer Science Research Internship Program. A joint Bar-Ilan University/Yeshiva University initiative, the program enables students to gain hand-on experience in emerging scientific fields while being mentored by Israel's finest scientists.
During the six-week research experience, students are conducting intensive internships in the University's research laboratories with faculty members from the Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Alexander Kofkin Faculty of Engineering, Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, and the Departments of Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, English Literature and Linguistics, and Psychology.
This year's participants are students from Yeshiva College, Stern College for Women, Queens College, Brooklyn College, Rutgers University and the University of Buenos Aires.
Prof. Arlene Wilson-Gordon, of Bar-Ilan's Department of Chemistry, is directing this year's program. Based on the students' academic background and interests, she paired them with Bar-Ilan faculty members and research assignments that would best enhance their summer experience and promote individual growth and career development. ”This is a tremendous opportunity for the students to experience a state-of-the-art lab in Israel and to get to know students from all the diverse sectors of Israeli society," she says.
The program also includes half-day trips to scientific, industrial, medical, archaeological, and other sites around the country, including IAI (Israel Aerospace Industries), the laboratories of the Agriculture Research Organization (Volcani Center), excavations at Tell es-Safi/Gath, Teperberg Winery, and more, lectures by BIU scholars on a range of topics, as well as night activities, Torah learning, and Shabbatonim at YU's Gruss Institute in Jerusalem, where the group is housed.
Since its inception in 2011, the program has benefited from the generosity of the late Dr. Mordecai D. Katz, Chairman, and subsequently Honorary Chairman, of the Bar-Ilan Board of Trustees, who supported the YU student participants, and from the generosity of the J. Samuel Harwit z”l and Manya Harwit-Aviv Charitable Trust. The Barbara and Fred Kort Foundation is generously supporting this year's program.