Grants and Writing Resources for Lewis University
Three Lewis teams took awards at DataFest 2026, the American Statistical Association's 48-hour data science competition, hosted on the Romeoville campus in April. One of them won Best in Show. At the 2026 Joint Mathematics Meeting, twin brothers who also play on the men's volleyball team each earned a Pi Mu Epsilon Student Speaker Award. In August 2025, four Lewis students presented two posters at MAA MathFest, and both won the MAA Outstanding Student Poster Award.
The Celebration of Scholarship
The fourteenth annual Celebration of Scholarship took place on April 22, 2026. It is open to every undergraduate and graduate student at Lewis, and work can be shown as a poster, a concurrent session talk, a panel, a roundtable or a creative piece. Several contests run inside the event. Graduate students enter the Three Minute Thesis, presenting original research in 180 seconds or less with a single slide, and undergraduates compete in separate STEM and HASS Slams. In 2026, entrants in the Br. Joel Damian Business Pitch Competition competed for cash awards totaling $25,000 and space in the Lewis University Regional Business Incubator.
The 2025 program also set aside a session for finalists for the Stephany Schlachter Excellence in Undergraduate Scholarship Award, which carries a $2,000 scholarship prize. Work from the 2025 event is archived in a Celebration of Scholarship collection.
Paid Summer Research
The Dr. James Girard Summer Undergraduate Research Program, called SURE, pairs undergraduates one-on-one with faculty mentors for ten weeks. In 2025 it paid a $4,000 stipend before taxes. Students from different disciplines meet weekly to talk about research ethics and scientific writing, and the summer ends with a symposium. Undergraduates presented 18 projects at the August 2025 symposium.
Honors and Jet Fuel Review
Admission to the Honors Program takes a GPA of 3.25 or higher, an application and one recommending teacher, for freshmen and for current and transfer students alike. Departments host national honor societies, among them Sigma Tau Delta in English and Phi Alpha Theta in history.
Jet Fuel Review is a student-run, faculty-advised literary journal published online twice a year. It publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction and art. A Lewis alumna launched it in May 2011 under the supervision of Dr. Simone Muench, according to the journal's history, and Issue 31 came out in spring 2026.
Writing Help and Dissertations
The Writing Center is on the first floor of the library and books face-to-face, phone and Microsoft Teams video appointments. Its writing mentors come from many majors and work as interested, critical readers, teaching strategies a writer can use on later papers. After each session the mentor emails a summary to the student and the instructor. Mentors also help with scholarship and fellowship essays, personal statements and MLA, APA and Chicago formatting, and English language learners can book International English Support conversations.
The 60-credit-hour Ed.D. in Educational Leadership for Teaching and Learning asks for a theoretically sound dissertation with a social justice perspective. The writing runs through Advanced Inquiry and Dissertation Research, a Dissertation Seminar and Dissertation 1. Candidates who have not finished within four years enroll in Dissertation Supervision each semester until the dissertation is done.
In April 2025 the library opened Digital Commons at Lewis University, an open access repository for work produced at Lewis. Finished graduate work goes into its Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations collection, and undergraduate theses and capstones are collected separately.
A final read for grammar, citation style and format is what our editors give Lewis papers, theses and dissertations. See our Lewis University dissertation and thesis editing and Lewis University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.
From Our Writing Guides
Compiled by James Peterson Brown, PhD, Managing Editor of Editors For Students. Links checked October 2026.
Editors For Students is an independent editorial service and is not affiliated with Lewis University, and your faculty may endorse our services individually. We look forward to helping you bring your Lewis writing to its strongest, submission-ready form.