Important note: the 2019 REU program at SAO is contingent upon approval of our funding by NSF. We anticipate that NSF will notify us of our funding status in February 2019. In the meanwhile we will process applications in the usual way, as we have done contiuously since 1994, as described below.

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 (but see below). 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