Current Opportunities for the Academic Year Part-Time Undergraduate Research Fellow Program (2025-26)
Academic Year Part-Time Undergraduate Research Fellow Positions
The applications and project descriptions are posted in Stanford On- and Off-Campus Learning Opportunities (SOLO) and are linked to the research project titles below.
Students may apply to as many projects as they would like but must apply to each project separately since the faculty mentors manage their own selection processes.
Students must be enrolled full-time in order to participate. Students who plan on studying abroad during this academic year are not eligible.
Closed Projects
Strengthening Social Capital Among Refugee Entrepreneurs: Testing AI Tools for Tie Formation and Maintenance
Chuck Eesley, Professor, SoE - Management Science & Engineering Department; Co-mentor: Xilan Zhang, PhD student, SoE - Management Science & Engineering Department
As of November 2024, Uganda hosts over 1.7 million refugees and asylum seekers in 13 districts in the Southwestern and Northern regions of Uganda, as well as in the capital of Kampala. The majority of the refugees originate from two neighboring countries which are affected by protracted crisis in South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite the existence of enabling policies that technically permit to work and own businesses, their ability to exercise these rights is often limited due to the barriers they face when pursuing livelihood opportunities. This project tests a new approach: using artificial intelligence to deliver personalized, lightweight support for relationship building. By equipping refugee entrepreneurs with AI-enabled tools that guide them in initiating conversations and maintaining follow-up, we explore whether scalable digital interventions can strengthen their networks and improve business outcomes.
Accelerating systematic reviews of development studies
Eran Bendavid, Professor - School of Medicine
Our team is changing the way evidence is assessed and aggregated. We are developing approaches to use AI to credibly and rigorously make sense of the scientific corpus on questions of health and global development.
Urban Growth in the Colombian Amazon
Valeria Ramirez Castaneda, Postdoctoral Fellow - King Center on Global Development
This project investigates how urban expansion in Leticia, Colombia—a tri-border Amazonian city—affects ecology, human–wildlife interactions, and the emergence of mosquito-borne diseases. Combining ecological fieldwork and participatory methods with local communities, the project seeks to document how construction types, neighborhood patterns, and local knowledge influence both environmental and public health outcomes. By centering community-driven perspectives, the research aims to generate more equitable frameworks for sustainable Amazonian urban futures.
Brazil Forest Restoration & Conservation
Gretchen Daily, Professor of Biology - Faculty Director, Natural Capital Project; Co-mentor: Hilary Brumberg, PhD student, E-IPER
Natural climate solutions such as forest conservation and restoration are essential for tackling climate change while providing co-benefits for biodiversity, water, and livelihoods. In this project, we will focus on Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, which has been reduced to just 12% of its original extent. Restoring this landscape is critical for securing ecosystem services such as carbon storage, water quality, and biodiversity habitat, especially for the millions of people who depend on these resources. Building on a three-year-long partnership with the Brazilian NGO SOS Mata Atlântica and leading Brazilian universities, this research will connect cutting-edge science to on-the-ground conservation practice. We will combine project-level data, satellite imagery, and statistical and machine learning models to generate maps of reforestation and conservation. Using the Natural Capital Project’s InVEST software, we will link reforestation outcomes to ecosystem service benefits, quantifying the climate, biodiversity, and water quality benefits. The final goal is to help guide cost-effective, durable, and high-impact restoration and conservation investments, while highlighting regions that require stronger community engagement, policy support, and financing to succeed. The student may have the opportunity to support additional related research projects.
Computer Vision, Drones, & Dengue
Joelle Rosser, Assistant Professor SoM - Medicine Department
We are developing deep learning algorithms to identify and classify mosquito breeding sites in high-resolution drone imaging to help map the risk of dengue fever.
Ecosystem Restoration in Tropical Peatlands
Alison Hoyt, Assistant Professor Doerr - Earth System Science; Co-mentor - Clarice Perryman, Postdoctoral Fellow, NSF Earth Sciences
We aim to understand the restoration and rewetting of carbon-rich peatland ecosystems.Tropical peatlands are wetland ecosystems that store large amounts of carbon belowground in their waterlogged soils. Across Southeast Asia, drainage and deforestation have shifted these ecosystems from carbon sinks to large sources of CO2 emissions. Efforts are now underway to restore and rewet tropical peatlands. We are studying an experimental peatland rewetting and agricultural site in Indonesia to investigate the impacts of restoration on tropical peatlands.
HarvestStat Asia
Jen Burney, Professor Doerr - Global Environmental Policy and Earth System Science
A network of food security researchers around the world is busy putting together the first global harmonized subnational agricultural data from national reports, ministries of agriculture, etc. Often these are from LMICs and involve data that was kept in paper format, has finally been digitized, and now needs to be cleaned, documented, and published. We have a team that has prepared data cleaning scripts and a pipeline; a research assistant or assistants would work with our group to modify that pipeline for a country or two (or more, depending on their skills/availability/enthusiasm). The RA(s) would need some Python coding experience and ideally interest in one of the target countries (remaining countries include Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Laos, Nepal, and North Korea). The student(s) would be a coauthor on published datasets and would be able to use cleaned data for their own analyses of interest/research projects. The bulk of data processing work here would be in the fall (or that would be the aim), and then the RA(s) would work with others on the HarvestStat team and/or in my group to begin to use these data to answer key questions about agricultural adaptations in agricultural economies.
Health Economics in Sub-Saharan Africa
Carlos Paramo, Postdoctoral Fellow King Center on Global Development
Field experiments focused on studying the demand and provision of healthcare services in sub-Saharan Africa. The student will support with early-stage research on health economics in sub-Saharan Africa. This includes a planned experiment Uganda (and possibly Kenya) studying the demand for antibiotics, medical provider behavior and prescribing practices, and policies that aim to improve healthcare provision for pediatric fevers and upper-respiratory infections. The student will support with data cleaning and exploratory analysis, literature review, and learn about the early stage design of a randomized controlled trial.
Infectious Diseases, Environment, Global Health, and Climate Change
Jade Benjamin-Chung, Assistant Professor SoM - Epidemiology and Population Health
We are seeking a research assistant to contribute to studies on on evidence-based global health interventions. The research assistant can contribute to different ongoing activities within the lab based on their interests. Current projects focus on housing health impacts, malaria prevention optimization, and climate resilience metrics.
Measuring the Impact of BSF Farming
Desiree LaBeaud, Professor SoM - Pediatrics Department
Black soldier fly (BSF) farming is a nature-based solution to the waste crisis. This project will measure the impact of a new community BSF farm in Kenya focused on environmental contaminants, financial improvements and woman empowerment.
Mitigating Conflict and Polarization
Saumitra Jha, Associate Professor GSB - Political Economy
This project will involve studying organizational and economic approaches to mitigating violent conflict and political polarization, both historically and in contemporary settings.
Refugee Policy in Kenya
Shelby Carvalho, Postdoctoral Fellow King Center on Global Development
In this project, we will examine the politics of refugee policy in Kenya. This will include analyzing five years of committee meeting minutes from the national parliament in Kenya in which members discussed and debated policy reforms related to refugees. By analyzing internal committee reports as a source of text and narrative data, we aim to describe a nuanced picture of policy debates, concerns, and opportunities for refugees in Kenya and the East Africa region more broadly.
Social-Ecological Trade-Offs in the Bolivian Amazon
Nicole Ardoin, Emmett Family Faculty Scholar Associate Professor, Environmental Social Sciences Senior Fellow; Co-mentor - Lily Colburn, PhD Student, Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER)
This mixed-methods project aims to better understand how ranchers in the Bolivian Amazon are making decisions about natural resource management and the implications of these decisions for the social-ecological future of the region.
The Future of Humanitarian Food Assistance
Jen Burney, Professor Doerr - Global Environmental Policy and Earth System Science
The network of international institutions, multi- and bi-lateral structures that have historically supported humanitarian assistance to countries and regions experiencing food insecurity crises is experiencing unprecedented strain. This is due to a combination of economic, political, and environmental forces. What should the world food "social safety net" look like and how do we know? A research assistant or assistants on this project would work with me, my research group, and others at the Center on Food Security and the Environment to understand the current landscape and its pressures, and would conduct a review of major donors’ approaches to emergency food assistance. Much of this information is documented in websites, briefs, policy documents, and internal organization documents; as such, the ideal RA is happy sleuthing creatively for information, working to organize and synthesize the information that exists, keeping track of sources and information, and writing compelling summary and analytical text. Outputs from this will be shared directly with the Food Security Leadership Council -- a unique opportunity for a student to interact with some of the world's most insightful and impactful leaders in food security and humanitarian issues.
Vietnam’s Mixed Healthcare System
Karen Eggleston, Senior Fellow DoR - Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI)
The role of private healthcare providers in achieving Universal Health Coverage: Lessons from Vietnam. Support research examining the evolving role of private healthcare providers in the mixed healthcare systems of low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) and their contribution to achieving Universal Health Coverage, with a specific focus on Vietnam.