Coached by People Who Do Real Science
Every Embark project is guided by two layers of expertise: a discipline mentor working in the student’s actual field, and an academic direction team that has spent a decade turning curiosity into award-winning research. No generic “competition tutors” — researchers, coaching research.
Academic Director · Dr. Wu
Section 01 — “Uncle Research”“Compared with chasing frontier technology, asking a good question matters more. Once you have found a good question, almost anything you do with it is genuinely creative.”
Dr. Wu has coached secondary-school research for ten years — long enough that students coined his nickname. He publishes himself (16+ SCI papers), judges himself (years across ISEF affiliates, the Yau Science Award, national youth science competitions and STS), and coaches from that double vantage: he knows what winning work looks like because he has both produced and evaluated it. His “award-logic” framework — how winning projects choose questions, structure evidence and survive judging — is the methodological spine of every Embark engagement, covering topic design, research execution and presentation end to end.
Representative Mentors
Section 02 — A Sample of the NetworkA look at the calibre of researcher behind Embark projects. We use initials to protect mentors’ ongoing university and lab affiliations — full credentials are shared in consultation. These five alone span medicine, economics, life sciences, aerospace and mathematics.
Nervous-system regeneration and neurodegenerative disease — glaucoma, ALS, Alzheimer’s — with work in medical imaging and synthetic biology.
Works at the intersection of econometrics and machine learning, applying data-driven methods to projects with real societal impact.
Three years as a lab PI across Oxford’s Clinical Neuroscience and Imperial’s Life Sciences departments. Wet-lab and computational (R · Python · Bash).
Former postdoctoral research assistant at Princeton; reviewer for multiple international journals.
Published research in convexity theory and number theory, with a string of completed mathematical research projects.
How Matching Works
Section 03 — Who You Work With WeeklyYour weekly sessions run with a mentor chosen for your specific field — drawn from a network of 3,000+ contracted researchers at leading universities and institutes worldwide. Here is how the match is made.
Field First
A robotics student gets a robotics researcher; a translational-medicine student gets someone who has worked a wet lab. Across all 22 ISEF categories.
Research Credentials, Verified
Mentors join the network through academic review by Dr. Wu’s team — publication record, research depth and teaching ability all checked.
Two Layers on Every Project
The discipline mentor runs weekly coaching; the academic direction team reviews milestones — design, data, paper, rehearsals — at each phase gate.
Meet Your Mentor Before You Commit
In the consultation we discuss your field and introduce the mentor we would match you with — credentials included.
- Competition registration guidance
- 1-on-1 research topic planning
- End-to-end competition coaching
- Lab technique & equipment support
