SoTS Research Residency

Real Problems, Real Stakeholders

Every team works on a real problem an external partner needs solved. Partners are typically researchers in the natural sciences: a university group, a government lab, a company, or an individual working scientist bringing AI into their research. Sometimes the problem is specific; often it is open-ended: where could AI help here, and how? The outcome is unknown in advance, to the team and the Research Guide alike.

There is no spec to hand off and build. A team has to understand both the science and the problem, map the existing research workflow, determine where AI genuinely helps and where it does not, then design, implement, and test a solution.

The Residency is built on a research-education methodology that Dr. Sergey Samsonau developed at NYU and refined over seven consecutive semesters, with more than 100 students completing 20+ team projects for external researchers at exactly this intersection. The methodology is published (arXiv:2210.08966). The Residency brings it to experienced high-school researchers, online.

• 7semesters refining the methodology
• 100+undergrad and grad students in the original program
• 20+team projects for external researchers

Those 20+ projects spanned fields and methods: microscope-image segmentation in biology, mass-spectrometry cancer detection in chemistry, spectral analysis of micro-diamonds in physics, and tooling for scientific software. See the example projects from that program for the full range.

How It Works

• Teams of 5 to 6 Residents work with one partner across two consecutive semesters.
• Defined roles within each team: every Resident owns a distinct part of the work, such as AI and computation, domain science, data and experiment, literature and theory, or coordination and communication. Roles divide responsibility, not effort: everyone researches, everyone presents.
• Live online sessions with a professional Research Guide: once a week in fall and spring, twice a week in summer, 1 to 1.5 hours each.
• Daily independent work between sessions: roughly 10 hours a week in fall and spring, 20 hours a week in summer.
• Weekly presentations inside the cohort: defend your reasoning to sharp peers.
• Final deliverable to the partner: a result they can actually use, such as an improved research workflow, an application working scientists can run, or a novel AI perspective on the processes inside a lab.

Who Guides the Team

Residents work under a professional Research Guide, a role that combines several things at once: research methodology, teaching, and the developmental judgment to read where a researcher is and what they need next. A Guide teaches research rather than assigns tasks. The method is cognitive apprenticeship. The expert moves on an open problem are made visible and scaffolded, then fade as the team becomes independent, while the outcome itself stays genuinely unknown. The role is professionally defined in The Research Guide: From Informal Role to Profession (Samsonau & Pearce, arXiv:2604.19961, 2026).

Dr. Sergey Samsonau leads the program and supervises every team. He works on both sides of this intersection: he guides research teams, and he applies AI to science himself. He co-authored the paper that defines the Research Guide profession, and he developed the methodology this program runs on.

He has spent a decade helping scientists bring modern tools into their work: teaching Essentials of Data Science to PhD students and postdocs at Columbia in 2016, serving as AI Technical Lead at NYU for five years, and leading research-enabling AI and data science initiatives across disciplines.

He organized the AI Meets Science conference, the first of its kind for the NYC metro area, with participants and top voices in the field from NASA, NIST, the Simons Foundation, SandboxAQ, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, NYU, Rutgers, Fordham, Arizona State, and Stevens Institute of Technology.

Start Any Semester. Stay for Two.

The Residency admits new teams three times a year, fall, spring, and summer, on the same calendar as Research Labs. Every team commits to two consecutive semesters. The first semester takes a team through scoping, the literature, first results, and the first real obstacle. The second semester is where the team works through it. That is where the learning happens.

The first cohort begins July 1, 2026. Apply for the summer start, or for a later fall or spring cohort.

At the semester boundary, each team presents its progress to the partner in a midpoint review. Continuation into the second semester is by demonstrated work, the same standard as everywhere at SoTS.

Because cohorts overlap, the Residency always contains teams in their second semester working alongside teams in their first. Newer teams watch veteran teams present; veteran teams answer newer teams' questions. This is how a real research group works, and it is by design.

Who Gets In

Admission has two requirements, and both must be demonstrated, not claimed.

At least one year of original, self-driven research. A sustained investigation you formulated and carried yourself, in a SoTS lab or anywhere else. Polished or not. Successful or not. What matters is the trace of actual work: what question you pursued, how far past the first obstacle you chased it, what you did when the easy path closed. Where the work was done does not matter. What school you attend does not matter. Whether it won anything does not matter.

The ability to reason from first principles in at least one discipline. Physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, or the organization of collective work.

The two requirements test different things. A year of work shows you can sustain a project. First-principles reasoning shows you understand a field deeply enough to apply it. A partner team needs both.

Admission is also a matter of composition. Teams need complementary strengths, so we admit the way a research group hires: qualified candidates first, then fit with the roles a team needs. Your prior research does not have to involve AI. A team needs domain scientists and rigorous experimentalists as much as it needs coders. A strong applicant may be offered a later cohort because this one already has the AI specialists it needs and no one who knows the science. That is a team-composition decision, not a judgment of the work.

Spots are limited and filled on the strength of the work. We read the applications. This is a selective, no-cost research program, and we treat it as one.

The Residency is open to applicants who currently live or study in North America, South America, Europe (including the UK), or the Gulf states (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar). As part of admission, we confirm each applicant's identity through a secure third-party verification service.

The Commitment

A partner is counting on the team. Every Resident owns a real part of the work that the others depend on. That shared accountability is part of what makes the experience worth it.

• Commit to the partner's area of need. How to tackle it is your team's to discover and design with your Research Guide; the area itself is the partner's, not a topic of your own.
• Show up to every session, prepared.
• Do the work between sessions.
• Stay accountable to your team and the cohort each week.
• Follow through on what you take on, across both semesters.

What Partners Get

As a partner, you bring a research question from your own scientific work, and we put a team on it for two semesters. The team works independently, under a SoTS Research Guide, toward a result you can use. The students stay ours, working your problem, not joining your group.

The Residency takes on research, not products. A project fits when it advances your science: a workflow to improve or make reproducible, an analysis or model for a question you are pursuing, or an open-ended "where could AI help in my research, and how?" It does not fit when the goal is a commercial product, something built for sale or for running a business. The team takes your question from there, scopes it, tests what AI can do for it, and builds toward a result you can use. This boundary is what keeps the program educational and public-interest. Intellectual property and the use of results are set in a short written agreement with each partner, strongly guided by the nonprofit, public-interest nature of the program.

The team covers the full stack, from your science to the implementation. They work out which modern methods fit the problem: data science and visualization, classical machine learning, deep learning, and today's generative and agentic AI. They engineer the result into reproducible, usable software. You need no technical background of your own.

Your time commitment is light: at most an hour every two weeks, often less. The team does the work and brings findings back to you.

The team is a small group of serious students, selected on demonstrated research and first-principles reasoning, and placed by role to fit the problem. They bring real effort, a careful perspective on what AI can do, and the persistence to follow a question past its first obstacle.

Every team is supervised by Dr. Sergey Samsonau, who leads the program. See Who Guides the Team above.

We work with partners of many kinds: universities and individual faculty, national labs, government science agencies, companies, and independent scientists. What matters is a real research question or need, not the size or type of the organization behind it.

The Residency is a nonprofit, public-interest program. The question you contribute advances your research, and students get real research experience working on it.

Because the program is educational and public-interest, the engagement can count toward the broader-impacts and outreach components that grant proposals ask for, such as NSF Broader Impacts. Ask us for a short paragraph you can include in a proposal.

Want to bring AI into your research? Write to us at team@teenscientists.org.

For Donors

The Residency is free for every admitted student. It is offered through the Authentic Research Access Program, a nonprofit initiative fiscally sponsored by NOPI, a registered 501(c)(3).

Donations sponsor two things: authentic research education for students, and better research driven by modern technology. They keep seats open for capable students regardless of ability to pay.

Authentic Research Partners is fiscally sponsored by the Nonprofit Organization for Philanthropic Initiatives, a program of NOPI INC, a Massachusetts nonprofit corporation and 501(c)(3) organization, EIN 81-5089505. Learn more at https://thenopi.org.