Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships

CURF’s annual Fall Expo poster session will take place on Monday, September 14, from 5:00-7:00pm in Houston Hall. If you'd like the opportunity to share your summer research with over 300 other undergraduate researchers, complete the application as soon as possible, but no later than Friday, August 21. You can expect to hear from us during the week of August 24. If you are selected to present at the Expo, you will be responsible for bringing your printed poster to the CURF office at College Hall G09 by Friday, September 4, and attending the Expo in person.

Apply at the link in our bio!

Fellowships are funding opportunities for promising Penn students and alumni to engage in study, research, service, or education, either domestically or abroad. Learn more about how you can position yourself to be a good candidate, what opportunities exist, and how CURF can help you through the application process.

Register at the link in our bio.

It may be hot outside, but the temperature in Pottruck was just right as PURM and SHIP students gathered for some friendly pickleball competition last week!

Manny Levine (E'28) is conducting research abroad this summer. He says, "Hi! I'm Manny and this summer, through the Paul and Kathleen Barthmaier Award, I've been able to conduct research on catalytic computing, a subfield of computational complexity, at Charles University in Prague. Computational complexity asks questions about the minimum resources required to solve certain algorithmic tasks, such as how much time do we need to compute the shortest path between a start and end destination, or how much memory do we need to multiply two numbers. We approach these questions from both an upper bound side, which involves coming up with algorithms minimizing resource usage, and on the other hand (attempting to) prove lower bounds. Building on that paradigm, catalytic computing asks about the potential to reuse memory (which we call space) for two purposes at once: for both long-term storage and short-term scratch paper, which will lead to space-savings if done repeatedly. Using clever arithmetic and compression tricks, it turns out that we're able to temporarily modify memory that's being used for long-term storage for intermediate calculations, and then revert the memory back to its initial state, thus ensuring the contents of the memory remain unchanged. Through CURF's support, I've been able to continue this study of catalytic computing to see how other resources, such as randomness, potentially affect the power of the catalytic model. As a result, my group has been able to show barriers to proving hierarchy theorems in the catalytic model."

Representatives from Career Services will speak with you about why research is important in a wide array of postgraduate pursuits and how to maximize your employment or graduate school prospects by getting deeply involved in research. They will discuss how to best communicate your research experiences in your written documents and in interviews.

Join the Zoom at the link in our bio.