Summer research student Alan Dong helped transition the LES-9 satellite’s original analog communication devices to digital platforms during his internship.

Summer Research Program

Each summer, the Laboratory offers undergraduate and graduate students the unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience in a leading-edge research environment. Program participants contribute to projects and gain experience that complements their courses of study. In recent summers, we've hired more than 200 students representing top universities.

Students have opportunities to

  • Interface with national experts in numerous fields of research
  • Work with state-of-the-art equipment on real-world technical applications
  • Present the results of their research conclusions at the end of the summer

The program runs from mid-May through mid-August and provides the following: 

  1. Competitive weekly pay.
  2. Round-trip travel expense assistance for students relocating from 50 miles outside the Boston area.
  3. Discounted housing on Northeastern University's campus up to 12 weeks for students whose permanent address is greater than 50 miles outside the Boston area.
  4. Daily free shuttle service from the Northeastern and MIT campuses to Lincoln Laboratory (Monday through Friday).

To be eligible for the Summer Research Program, students must have at least completed their sophomore year of college or be enrolled in a master's or doctoral program.  In addition, students must have maintained an excellent academic record and be a U.S. citizen.

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Examples of Past Summer Projects

  • Create a hypervideo system by incorporating a steerable mirror with a hyperspectral sensor to enable real-time data acquisition and detection capability at the level of 0.5 to 1 Hz
  • Design components to meet the basic aeronautical, structural, and payload requirements for a rapid-prototyped small unmanned aerial vehicle; optimize the design to use fluid deposition modeling technology for part fabrication
  • Investigate methods for high-impedance probing of avalanche photodiodes (APDs) and help set up a new probe station for electrical characterization of APDs and charge-coupled devices
  • Develop a titanium nitride atomic layer deposition process in the Microelectronics Laboratory to deposit titanium nitride thin films with appropriate electrical properties
  • Identify interesting cyber security technologies, evaluate them, and experiment with getting two of them to work together
  • Design a mission planning software suite for future protected tactical satellite communications
  • Integrate and test a web-based chat tool into the Laboratory's airborne communications testbed; then, modify and add functionality to the system
  • Help with hardware development, field testing, and system development for an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle
  • Develop displays and software infrastructure for an unmanned aerial system ground control system/network, including developing a graphical-user-interface and interfaces to software, hardware, networks, and an open-source data-management system
  • Design and implement a framework for evaluating the performance of information retrieval algorithms when applied to disaster-related social-media filtering tasks
  • Model and analyze the geolocation performance of the Microsized Microwave Atmospheric Satellite (MicroMAS)
  • Research and implement two-dimensional mapping algorithms for sparse matrices
  • Develop a novel system for topical and lexical analysis of speech corpora for situations in which no prior linguistic knowledge or annotation is provided to the system
  • Design and code the software architecture for Monte Carlo simulations of ballistic missile defense scenarios

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