Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

Most science faculty at Georgetown include undergraduates in their research projects. According to some of Dr. Mak Paranjape’s recent undergraduate students, the close collaboration with faculty at Georgetown is the highlight of their education.

“The Physics department offered a good in-between in terms of size and resources, but still each student gets individualized attention,” commented Jessica Taff, who recently enrolled in Georgetown’s Medical School.

Matt Wideroff, who entered Medical School at the University of Miami, echoes this satisfaction with the close contact with researchers like Paranjape.“The program is the perfect size. There are lots of collaborations between faculty, and Mak (Paranjape) has a really phenomenal grad student, Yogesh Kashte, who’s very helpful and a lot of fun. Doing research requires a lot of stamina, but the research experience encourages a different way of thinking.”

“GAEL gave me a unique opportunity to acquire skills that would have been difficult to learn elsewhere at an undergraduate level,” said Jonny Rogers, who participated in GUROP, received an Honors degree in Physics, and is enrolled in aeronautical engineering at Georgia Tech. “One of the department's most important strengths is its encouragement of undergraduate research, and I tried to take advantage of this [opportunity] for three of my four years.”

Paranjape has sponsored over 20 undergraduates in his lab since he came to Georgetown in 1998. He even has a standing offer that is hard to beat: If an undergraduate student’s research project results in a publication, Paranjape will take that student to professional meetings so that they can present their results; he’s taken students to Barcelona, Spain; Porto, Portugal; Toulouse, France; and Ottawa, Canada.

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