LLRISE is a free two-week radar engineering workshop that MIT Lincoln Laboratory runs for rising high school seniors. Students live in MIT dorms, attend sessions on the MIT campus and at Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, study signal processing, RF design, pulse compression and ranging, and synthetic aperture radar, and solder a circuit board and antenna to build a Doppler and range radar of their own. The 2026 workshop ran July 12 to July 25.
LLRISE is very small. Lincoln Laboratory’s 2025 Impact Report says it accepted 26 students nationwide out of 800 applicants that year, and 24 students took part in 2026. The program is free apart from travel to and from MIT. Eligibility is narrow: only US citizens may apply, and foreign citizens with permanent residency are not eligible. 2027 dates have not been announced; the last cycle closed on March 11, 2026.
Before the program ends, students design and run an experiment with their radar, present it to the Laboratory community and the public, and demonstrate it to visitors at the MIT Museum. For students drawn to electrical engineering, it is a complete hands-on engineering project that belongs on a college application.
