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Division of Academic and Student Affairs 
Office of Undergraduate Research

Find CUREs (Research Courses)

CUREs are a great way to add research into your time at NC State. The research can be from any field/discipline, and can be part of a larger project the instructor or collaborators may be involved with. See below how to find/identify CUREs and learn more.

Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs)

CUREs are courses where real-world research has been embedded into the curriculum. Instructors and students collaborate on an original research project that has significance outside the classroom.

Students gain hands-on experience with the major steps of research, including higher level critical thinking, data analysis, and research communication.

Many senior capstone courses or practicums are CUREs!

Researcher looking through a microscope with a laptop in the foreground showing cells.
Dr. Arion Kennedy, Molecular and Structrual Biochemistry, in her lab on main campus. The Kennedy lab aims to determine the impact of the innate and adaptive immune system on obesity-associated metabolic disorders. Photo by Marc Hall

Identifying CUREs

Courses that qualify as CUREs don’t tend to be labeled as such. Instead, students must piece this together from the course description (though academic advisors may also be able to help). When reviewing a course’s description, check for the following characteristics:

  • Students make discoveries that can have an impact outside the classroom (e.g., the broader research community).
    • Are you being challenged to develop a question and/or to develop a strategy to answer it? Is the question you’re answering something no one knows the answer to and has significance in the real world?
  • Students learn the key steps of the research process and are meaningfully involved in most of them.
    • Are you going to learn how to go from developing a research question to obtaining and communicating results? Will you get direct experience with most of these steps?
  • Students learn to communicate their research results.
    • Are you being challenged to share your results in writing, poster, or oral presentation?
  • The research progresses from term to term.
    • I.e., students are not repeating the work of prior course students as occurs in basic lab courses teaching techniques, rather they are continuing the work or are starting a new line of research).
  • The course is not an Independent Study course, rather it has a structured curricula and students can freely sign up without first obtaining a mentor.

If you find all of these attributes, the course is a CURE and counts as a research experience.

CURE Database

The Office of Undergraduate Research has recently embarked on a multiyear plan to catalog the CUREs and other research-related courses across the campus to create a searchable database for students.

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