Important note: the Astronomy REU program at SAO has been informed that we have been funded by NSF for 2019 and 2020. Accordingly, we anticipate making offers on March 1 to 11 undergraduates for the summer of 2019.

Second Important note: we became aware on February 27 that this year some Astro REU programs are making offers on days other than March 1. Our offers will nonetheless begin going out on March 1, per our standard practice. Students to whom we make offers on that day will be given one week to accept or decline them.

We expect to begin accepting applications for the 2019 summer program sometime in December. See the link at left to apply online.

For more information, please DOWNLOAD OUR FLYER.

The SAO Summer Intern Program is an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) internship where students take on an astrophysics research project with an SAO or Harvard scientist. In 2019 the program will run for 10 weeks, from June 2 - August 10. Students are expected to work at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for the full duration of the program. We house our interns in Harvard's graduate student dormitory facilities.

The program is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution.

Potential areas of research include (with a few example study subjects that reflect ongoing research at the CfA):

• Galaxies. How do they form, what powers them, how will they evolve over cosmic time?
• Our Solar System. What are near-Earth asteroids? What kinds of objects populate the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt?
• Stars and Planets. Are stellar models accurate? Where are new planets to be found?
• Lab Astrophysics. What chemistry takes place in space? Do ices matter? How did the Earth get its water?
• Extreme Astrophysics. What connects supermassive black holes to their host galaxies? What can we learn from X-ray emitting binary stars?

...and can involve data from a host of facilities, including space-based telescopes like NASA's Kepler, Spitzer, and Chandra missions (among others), and the many ground-based observatories often used by SAO scientists, such as:

• The Submillimeter Array in Hawaii
• The MMT on Mt. Hopkins in Arizona
• The Magellan Telescopes on Las Campanas, in Chile
• The Millimeter-Wave Telescope in Cambridge