The Yale Undergraduate Research Conference (YURC) is the nation’s largest and most prestigious student-run research conference, bringing together hundreds of undergraduates from around the world to Yale University. Participants present original research spanning the full spectrum of academic disciplines, from science and engineering to the social sciences and humanities.

Application Opens: August 1st
Application Deadline: January 1st
Late Registration Deadline: February 1st
The finalized conference schedule will be available shortly.
A vast majority of students who attend YURC receive funding from their research group/institution to attend.
Please visit our Scholarship Directory to see if your institution provides funding to travel.
We are happy to provide letters of support for institutional funding/visa applications, please reach out to yura@yale.edu with subject line “YURC Support”
Please visit our FAQ to answer any questions you may have.
If you have any additional questions that are not answered please reach out to yura@yale.edu with the subject (YURC Support)

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

David W. Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner (2019) for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, widely regarded as the definitive biography of Douglass and winner of seven other major book awards, including the Bancroft Prize and the Lincoln Prize. Dr. Blight is one of the nation's foremost authorities on the Civil War and its enduring legacy in American memory, and he directs Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, where he organizes major conferences, lectures, and public history initiatives. His scholarship has reshaped how historians understand slavery, emancipation, and the long cultural afterlife of the Civil War, earning him election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the presidency of the Society of American Historians. Before joining Yale in 2003, he taught for thirteen years at Amherst College, and earlier in his career spent seven years as a public high school teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan.

Murat Günel operates on complex aneurysms, vascular malformations, and tumors deep in the brain's most sensitive territory. He's the Sterling Professor of Neurosurgery at Yale School of Medicine, with joint appointments in genetics and neuroscience, and has chaired Yale's Department of Neurosurgery since 2014. He also serves as Neurosurgeon-in-Chief of the Yale New Haven Health System and chairs the Yale Medicine Board.
Outside the operating room, Günel runs a genomics lab hunting for the genetic causes of brain and vascular disease. This work that helped identify the chromosomal variants behind ruptured aneurysms and has mapped the mutational landscape of brain tumors like meningiomas. He trained at Istanbul University before coming to Yale-New Haven Hospital in 1991, first as an intern and later as chief resident, and has stayed at Yale ever since. He's a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and in 2026 was named Medical Director for Brain-Computer Interfaces at Science Corporation, extending his work on cortical function into next-generation neurotechnology.