Mentoring of undergraduates by faculty in the research lab is a high impact teaching practice that improves a range of students’ disciplinary skills, data acquisition and application skills, and writing and oral presentation skills, among others. These formative experiences can also provide a clarification of purpose for undergraduates with regard to career path. However, faculty are often limited in the number of students they can effectively mentor in a traditional research lab setting, thereby limiting the number of student participants. Incorporating authentic undergraduate research experiences into the teaching laboratory is a high-impact teaching practice that can achieve many similar outcomes as mentored research lab experiences, but provides for a broader engagement of students. Presented here is an approach taken over the last several years to incorporate authentic research experiences into a sophomore-level genetics class at a private liberal arts college. The laboratory combines two distinct, semester-long, research projects, one of student-design and one of instructor-design based on ongoing work in the research lab. The laboratory takes advantage of the relative ease of working with the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae (budding yeast) to introduce students to the foundational principles of transmission and molecular genetics. Three years of assessment using the Classroom Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) Survey, developed by David Lapatto at Grinnell College, indicates significant learning gains by students participating in the course. The goals of this presentation are to engage and share ideas with colleagues from other institutions using this pedagogical approach, and to share ideas with others seeking to include authentic research into their own classrooms.