Michelle So, Contributing Photographer

The 10th Yale Undergraduate Research Conference, or YURC, is slated to be an official event for University President Maurie McInnis’ inauguration this year — a first for the organization.

The YURC is an interdisciplinary, undergraduate-run research symposium. At the inauguration, which will take place between April 5-6 this year, undergraduate researchers will be invited to present their  research at Yale. 

“It has been an uphill battle for us,” YURC Committee Head Rishit Shaquib ’28 told the News. “We don’t have central funding, so we’re seeing our largest expansion to date.”

In previous years, the organization worked with a budget of roughly $4,000. 

This year, the student organizers expect costs to rise tenfold to accommodate four times the number of participants.

“We’re different from other undergraduate research symposiums in that we’re interdisciplinary,” YURC President Zihan Yang ’26 said. “Yale has such a large humanities department, and we’re really excited to have both humanities and science research.”

Few conferences accommodate the diverse range of subjects Yale specializes in. 

Yale’s departments, participants noted, each host their own symposiums at the end of the year. The vision is that YURC will combine topics from each department to showcase the rich research across disciplines.

“Hopefully, it will make us more interesting to a larger group of people, not just people who are interested in science research but people who are interested in seeing what research looks like in other fields [such as] political science or history,” Speaker Committee member Noah Abbott ’28 said.

The team is currently in the process of finalizing its speakers, but YURC has a couple of guests it is excited to highlight.

These notable keynote speakers include Ramanan Laxminarayan, a Princeton economist and epidemiologist at the One Health Trust, and Edward Altman, a NYU professor who formed the Altman Z-score for predicting bankruptcy.

YURC is committed to achieving both geographic and racial representation in participants. To cater to a broader research community, the group has engaged in outreach across five regions of the U.S. 

“We’re really focusing on building something that’s geographically diverse, compositionally diverse and diverse from a fields and interests perspective,” Shaquib said.

To address underrepresented groups in research, YURC said that Yale’s Central Diversity Office has agreed to offer scholarships for travel and registration for individuals accepted from historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. 

Those unable to attend the event in person have the option to register to the virtual conference, which includes speaker recordings, networking opportunities and virtual poster sessions.

YURC is organized by the Yale Undergraduate Research Association.