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HEI's Summer Fellowship Program
Summer Fellowship
Fellow and mentor applications for summer 2025 are now closed.
HEI is excited to continue its Summer Fellowship Program for another year! The HEI Summer Fellowship program aims to encourage rising juniors and seniors to explore research opportunities in the environmental health sciences. The program supports highly qualified undergraduate students who would not otherwise have a similar opportunity. Each summer fellows are matched with a research mentor to pursue a tailored environmental health project. Environmental health fields are defined broadly and include environmental exposure assessment, epidemiology, and public health among other areas.
The program provides financial support for a 10-week summer fellowship during the months of June through August. Start and end dates will be flexible based on academic calendars, with office hours occurring between June 2 and August 22. The program is run in collaboration with the International Society of Exposure Science and the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. The fellowship is open to mentors and students based in the United States. A joint HEI/ISEE/ISES committee selects prospective fellows and matches them with mentors at academic and nonprofit institutions and state or local governments.
Links to important information
Information for Prospective Summer Fellows
Information for Prospective Mentors
Expanding the Fellowship Program
Joint Committee
For More Information
Information for Prospective Summer Fellows
Overview
2025 Fellowship applications are now closed.
Fellows spend the summer developing and conducting research alongside a mentor at an academic institution or non-profit organization. Applicants are not required to have a background in life sciences but should be motivated to learn more about environmental health sciences as a potential career path.
For summer 2025, we lined up 26 potential mentors across the United States who are excited to host fellows, share their knowledge and ideas, and give fellows a flavor of what environmental health research is like.
To foster connections among fellows, HEI staff plan several activities throughout the program, including office hours and career conversations. Fellows are expected to work with their mentors to prepare a proposal describing their plans for the summer and to deliver mid-summer and final presentations.
Eligibility
Applicants must be a college junior or senior the fall after the fellowship and authorized to work in the United States. The program requires about 40 hours per week over the fellowship period, and fellows should not be taking more than one summer class. This fellowship is intended as a first or early research experience for students for whom this will be a unique experience.
Application Process
2025 Fellowship applications are now closed. Contact us at fellowship@healtheffects.org if you have questions. The deadline for applying to the summer 2025 cohort was January 6, 2025. Decisions will be communicated to applicants no later than the end of March 2025. Stipends are $8,000 for the summer of 2025, and the stipend amounts are reviewed and adjusted annually.
Evaluation Process
Applications are evaluated based on an applicant’s goals and motivation to pursue environmental health research, description of how the fellowship provides an opportunity not otherwise available, prior experiences and academic progress, and current skills and those that the applicant would like to acquire. Each application is reviewed by one member of ISEE and one member of ISES. The joint committee that includes members of HEI staff, ISEE, and ISES then selects finalists based on the scoring of applications. Finalists are reviewed by the mentors identified by those applicants to ensure a good fit with the project. A final selection is made by the joint committee.
Research Opportunities
Selected fellows are matched with mentors at institutions across the United States based on their preferences as indicated in the applications. In the list of mentor opportunities, each mentor indicates what the fellow can expect in terms of the research environment, who will supervise them and how often, what skills might be gained, and what opportunities are available to interact with other students.
Each year, the list is organized by geographic location, recognizing that it might be easier to take advantage of an opportunity closer to where you live or attend school. In addition to the project itself, applicants should consider other factors that could help determine what might be a great opportunity, such as the type of research, what skills they might gain, and how many other students and researchers there are in the lab. As part of the application process, applicants are asked to indicate which opportunities interest them most and why. This information is used in the application review and to match fellows with mentors. We aim to match selected fellows with one of their top three mentor choices, but we cannot guarantee specific matches.
Information for Prospective Mentors
2025 mentorship applications are now closed. Researchers at academic and nonprofit institutions and state and local governments can apply to host an undergraduate student and serve as a research mentor. Mentors are independent investigators at the faculty-level or equivalent. Mentors get the opportunity to support the careers of undergraduates, and fellows also can meaningfully contribute to their mentors’ ongoing projects. Types of research opportunities that mentors can provide might include bench science, data analysis, fieldwork, and modeling. Please note that HEI will financially support the fellows with a stipend, facilitate the matching process, and provide office hours support, but the mentors are expected to provide the research project and include their fellow in their lab or departmental activities.
The application will ask you to answer some questions about yourself and your research:
- What can the fellow expect in terms of the research environment?
- Who will supervise them and how often?
- What opportunities will the fellow have to interact with other students?
- What will be the in-person experience of the fellow if you are matched?
This information will not be used to select mentors. Rather, it is meant to provide prospective fellows with information that helps them to decide which opportunities they would prefer if selected for the fellowship.
Program expectations for mentors:
- Be a U.S.-based independent researcher at the faculty level or equivalent.
- Host the fellow in your lab for an in-person experience (or remote if your organization operates completely remotely) for the 10-week period. Note that fellows may take one summer class but are expected to be present full-time (defined as 5 days per week for 40 hours).
- Attend a mentor training call before the start of the program.
- Meet formally with the fellow at least once a week.
- Invite the fellow to attend lab meetings and trainings as appropriate.
- Work with the fellow at the start to define the project and deliverables; the fellow is required to send a 2-page proposal to HEI 2 weeks after the start date (HEI will provide a template).
- Help the fellow prepare for mid-summer and end-of-summer presentations. Mentors are strongly encouraged to attend the presentations if their schedules allow.
Expanding the fellowship program
HEI welcomes contributions from individuals and organizations to maintain and grow the fellowship program in future years! If you would like to discuss opportunities to grow the program, please email us at fellowship@healtheffects.org.
Joint Committee
A joint committee with representatives from HEI, ISEE, and ISES manages the fellowship program. Members of the joint committee are as follows:
Carrie Breton, University of Southern California (ISEE)
Christine Ekenga, Emory University (ISES)
Honghyok Kim, University of Illinois Chicago (ISEE)
Donghai Liang, Emory University (ISES)
Peng Gao, Harvard University (ISES)
Beate Ritz, University of California—Los Angeles (ISEE)
Additional support is provided by HEI staff including Drs. Ellen Mantus, Elise Elliott, and Allison Patton, as well as research assistants Hlina Kiros and Samantha Miller. This program is also supported by Dr. Lenny Howard, ombudsman to HEI.
For more information
Please email fellowship@healtheffects.org for further information about any aspect of the HEI Summer Fellowship Program.
The HEI Summer Fellowship is presented in partnership with
Sponsors
The HEI Summer Fellowship Program would like to thank our sponsors, the American Chemistry Council and individual donors for generously supporting this program.
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 Summer Fellowship Syllabus 2025 | 178.17 KB |
