Brown Summer Research Programs for High School Students

This page is part of our guide on how to do research in high school. Searches for a Brown program often return provider blogs or a cancer center at a different university, so this page uses only Brown University’s own pages, dates each claim, and separates research options from paid courses.

Does Brown run a summer research program for high school students?

Yes, but the options are narrow and they differ in kind. Brown’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine lists a five-week summer internship that places students in a lab for a research project with a final presentation, open to Rhode Island students only.^[1] Brown Pre-College Programs offer Course-Based Research Experiences (CREs), five-week hybrid courses in which students design and carry out a research project.^[3]

Option	Run by	Who it is for, per Brown	Cost or pay, per Brown
Pathology summer internship	Pathology and Laboratory Medicine	Rhode Island students only, about six places^[1]	No stipend or cost listed^[1]
Course-Based Research Experiences	Brown Pre-College Programs	Students completing grades 10 to 12, ages 16 to 18 by June 15, 2026^[3]	$8,902 commuter or $10,858 residential for the five-week hybrid row (2026)^[5]
Summer@Brown courses	Brown Pre-College Programs	Students completing grades 9 to 12, ages 14 to 18 by June 14, 2026^[4]	Per-course fees by length and format (2026)^[5]

Both Pre-College rows describe the most recent summer, and Brown’s pages list no terms yet for the next one.

What is Brown’s pathology summer research internship?

It is a lab placement for local students. Brown’s pathology page describes a five-week program with three parts: a lab placement for a research project with a final presentation, a half day each week shadowing pathologists at university-affiliated hospitals, and career sessions that include a college essay workshop.^[1] The page says the program is for Rhode Island students only and seeks about six students from historically marginalized or economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Rising juniors and seniors are encouraged to apply, and other grades will be considered.^[1]

The page lists a May 22, 2026 application deadline and an application form. It gives no stipend, and its dates field shows the year 2006, which looks like a typo, so confirm the dates with the contact on the page.^[1]

Brown’s biomedical pathways page tells a different story. It says the Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Summer Enrichment Program is on hold until further notice.^[2] When two Brown pages disagree, write to the department before you plan around the program.

Are there other Brown programs for local high school students?

Brown’s biomedical pathways page lists several short programs, mostly for Rhode Island students and mostly in medicine. They are exposure programs, not research projects, and the page does not describe a research component for them.^[2]

HealthCORE: open to high school students, listed for July 6 to July 16, 2027, with applications opening in May 2027.^[2]
Mentorship, Early Exposure, and Training in Surgery (MEETS): for students from the Central Falls and Pawtucket school districts, listed for April 19 to April 23, 2027.^[2]
Pathways to Medicine: for local Rhode Island high school students, matched with professional student mentors.^[2]
Weeks of Medical School: for students from two named high schools, Central Falls High School and Shea High School, listed for July 8 to July 16, 2027.^[2]

The page lists no cost or stipend for any of them. Eligibility is tied to where you live or go to school, so check it before you plan around one.

What are Brown’s Course-Based Research Experiences?

They are courses built around a research project. Students spend the first two weeks online learning background content, writing a literature review to find possible research questions, and learning methods. They then form a hypothesis and an experimental design, and spend the last three weeks on campus in Providence completing the project and presenting at a CRE Symposium.^[3]

For 2026 the page listed dates of June 22 to July 24 and topics that included antibiotic drug discovery from soil microbes, wild yeast identification, nanotechnology and machine learning for physics and astronomy.^[3] Courses are not graded. Students who complete one get a Digital Certificate of Completion, and those in a course of two weeks or longer also get a Course Performance Report.^[3]

A CRE is a course with a supervised project. Our guide to what a mentored research program involves explains how that differs from a mentored lab placement. Brown’s pages do not say how many students a CRE takes or who supervises each project.

How much do Brown Pre-College programs cost, and how do you apply?

Costs depend on the course length and format, and they are per course. For Summer 2026 Brown listed a one-week residential course at $3,748 and a three-week residential course at $8,372. The five-week hybrid row, which matches the CRE dates, was $10,858 residential and $8,902 commuter.^[5] Brown’s table has no separate CRE row, so ask Pre-College which price applies. The posted fee covers one course, and course materials and travel are not included.^[5]

The Summer 2026 application opened January 14, 2026 and closed with a May 15, 2026 deadline, and applications may close early if programs fill.^[6] A complete application includes the correct transcripts and a recommendation.^[6] Brown says admission decisions usually come within 15 business days of a complete application.^[6]

Brown lists scholarships for admitted students and application fee waivers, and says waiver requests do not influence admission decisions.^[7] Brown’s July 2026 news release says it runs 11 Pre-College Programs in all, each lasting one to six weeks.^[8]

How can you tell a Brown program from a lookalike?

Check who runs it on a page you can verify. A Brown program sits on a brown.edu address and names the Brown office in charge. The University of Louisville’s Brown Cancer Center is a different institution, and a few companies sell programs that use “Brown” in marketing. This checklist works for any program:

Open the program’s own page. Does the address end in brown.edu, and does it name the Brown unit in charge?
Find the cost or pay on that page. Trust it over any other site when they differ.
Read what you will do. A lab placement, a course and a company’s own mentoring are different things.
Ask who supervises you, and get the answer in writing.
Ask what is refunded and when, and get that in writing too.

Our hub on how to tell if a research program is legit covers red flags and questions to ask before you pay.

What can you do if you cannot get into a Brown program?

You can start research without one. A project needs a question, a source of data or text, and feedback from someone who knows the field. Read how to find a research mentor and how to volunteer in a lab. Our post on Harvard summer research programs uses the same format if you are comparing universities.

What should you do next?

Open the Brown pages for the year you plan to apply and write down the eligibility, cost or pay and deadline. Then decide whether a Brown option or a project you run on your own fits your goal. If you want an outside view of how your overall profile reads, the free review on ivy-league.io is built for that.

What do we not know?

Costs, dates and eligibility on Brown’s pages change each year, and the Pre-College pages describe the most recent summer, while some local programs list next year’s dates. Brown’s pathology page and its biomedical pathways page disagree about whether the pathology internship is running, and the pathology page gives no stipend. Brown’s cost table has no separate row for Course-Based Research Experiences. This is not a complete list of Brown programs: other Brown offices run programs whose terms vary. We do not know how any program affects an admission decision, and no source we know of shows that it does.