Advice for Students and Teachers: If you have any research institution nearby

I teach at Evanston Township High School. We are incredibly fortunate to have Northwestern University in town, and there are options for some number of students to work in professional research labs, or at least have professors in any number of fields of research to talk with about project ideas, lab techniques, analysis, and so on.

If you are in a similar situation, but are new to the notion of science research and have no idea about research questions that are doable or are looking to work in a lab, here is a recommendation. Go to the university or institutional page, find the pages for various departments, and then go to the faculty or research staff page. Check out each professor's web site, and they will almost certainly have brief descriptions about what their research group works on. Find your favorite 3 or 4 faculty members (i.e. that are most interesting to you), and have a teacher email them. I recommend a teacher for the first contact attempt simply because they are more likely to get a reply than a high school student - just the way it is.

But this is a good, effective way to quickly narrow a search for research ideas if you are trying to get into a lab!