Jessica Li

Aspiring Scholars Directed Research Program (ASDRP) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit summer program that provides opportunities for high school students throughout the Bay Area, especially those who are underrepresented in STEM or who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, to conduct high-level novel scientific research. Students participate in research projects across various subjects in STEM, including chemistry, biology, computational modeling, computer science, and much more. ASDRP provides students with research mentors and over $200,000 worth of research equipment in our research laboratory. Students are matched with research mentors who have experience in academia or industry in their particular field; together, they design a research project. These projects are not science experiments in which the results are known a priori, but rather are original research projects that expand current scientific knowledge. Students execute research projects, learn scientific reading and writing skills, write research papers on their results, undergo mock peer-review, publish their research papers in the ASDRP Communications online journal, and give poster presentations at the end-of-summer expo. We follow up with students from ASDRP to help place them into university research laboratories and industry internships in subsequent summers. The inaugural cohort of ASDRP started in summer 2018. ​Please see fremontstem.org/asdrp for details.