SuperUROP class of 2015 graduates with high accomplishment and promise

As more than 90 students in MIT's SuperUROP Advanced Undergraduate Research Opportunites Program flowed into a year-end certificates presentation event on May 7 at the Media Lab Skyline Room, they looked quite ready to celebrate a year of work on intense research collaborations with faculty advisors, supported as by the generous backing of industry and private sponsors. Senior Ava Soleimany says she has gained a "much-nuanced understanding of what exactly research involves." With an interest in the computational aspects of synthetic biology and its medical applications, Soleimany applied to be a SuperUROP in spring 2014 in Professor Timothy Lu's Synthetic Biology Group. She was able to extend her existing Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project into a SuperUROP. "It allowed me to hit the ground running in the fall while many of my peers were still sorting out the details of their projects," she notes.