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Torin Clark

Torin Clark was a sophomore in aerospace engineering at the °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï when he first got a real look at what researchers actually do. It pointed him in a direction he had not expected.

In 2006, Clark applied to CU °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï's Discovery Learning Apprenticeship (DLA) program and began working alongside a faculty member and a graduate student in the aerospace department. The research topic itself was not what drew him in. It was the nature of the work.

"What I found is that I really, really loved the process of doing research," Clark said. "Answering questions that weren't known, trying to solve problems, troubleshooting things, figuring out what the next important question we should be asking is."

Before the DLA, Clark was doing well in his classes but had little sense of what lay beyond them. Research filled in that picture.

"I was taking classes and doing well, but I just didn't know what research was all about or that it was a career path people could go into," he said. "I got to see behind the curtain of what professors do on a daily basis, what grad students do, and all of the interesting questions they were working on."

Clark continued his research beyond the DLA program, returning for a second summer and eventually building his senior project on the work he had started as an apprentice. Along the way, he co-authored a conference paper and presented it, giving him something concrete to point to when he began applying to graduate schools.

"I think it was quite critical," he said of his undergraduate research experience. "If you don't have research experience and you're applying to graduate school, you might have straight A's and be wonderful in the classroom, but people are looking for prior research experience. Not just 'I kind of followed someone around.' They want to see an extended period of undergraduate research experience that has led to something concrete."

Clark was admitted to graduate programs at MIT and Stanford, completed a PhD and a postdoctoral fellowship, and eventually returned to °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï as a faculty member, which had been his goal for some time. CU °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï's strength in bioastronautics was a draw, as was the opportunity to work with undergraduate students again.

"I knew that working with undergraduate students was an important part of why I wanted to be a professor," he said.

Clark is now an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, affiliated with the biomedical engineering and robotics programs and a principal investigator in the Bio Astronautics Laboratory. His research focuses on understanding the challenges humans face in space and developing solutions to help astronauts perform well in extreme environments, with applications that extend to pilots of high-performance aircraft as well.

In his ten or so years on the faculty, Clark has mentored more than 70 undergraduate research assistants. Some have gone on to graduate school, others to postdoctoral fellowships, industry positions, or careers in academia.

Clark is straightforward about the practical value undergraduate researchers bring to his work. Much of what his lab does involves human subject experiments, which require multiple people to run. That does not map neatly onto a model where a single PhD student works independently.

"Having undergraduates involved with the research is really valuable," he said. "A lot of those human subject experiments just require multiple people to perform them."

Undergraduate researchers have also helped the lab stay productive during gaps in external funding. When a project winds down but a useful line of experiments remains unfinished, an undergraduate can carry that work forward, sometimes to a first-authored publication.

"Often the undergraduate student who started to work on something will continue and then publish a paper where they're the first author," he said.

The programs have also made it easier to pursue early-stage work. When the lab needs pilot data to support a grant proposal, undergraduate researchers can take that on without pulling a PhD student away from their funded project.

"It has expanded both the inflow and the outflow of our research program," Clark said.

Most of the lab's external funding comes from NASA, the Department of Defense, and other agencies focused on human performance. Those budgets tend to leave limited room for undergraduate support, which is where DLA and SPUR come in.

"Programs like DLA and SPUR really enable us to leverage the funding we do have to get undergraduate students involved and perform the research we are proposing," he said. "Having that cost-sharing is really helpful."

For Clark, the impact is deeply personal. The same type of opportunity that introduced him to research years ago now serves as a pathway for the next generation of engineers and scientists.

Looking back, it is easy to trace the arc of his career—from a curious undergraduate seeking direction, to a graduate student exploring new questions, to a professor advancing human spaceflight research and mentoring future innovators. What began as a single undergraduate research opportunity became the starting point for a lifetime of discovery.

And now, through the students he mentors, that cycle continues.