Undergraduate research opportunities are often restricted to students with academic promise and ambition, directly constraining the diversity of our scientific communities. Bacteriophage discovery and genomics is a powerful platform for engaging early career undergraduate students in authentic scientific research, and with its technical and conceptual simplicity is accessible to anyone with a mere scintilla of curiosity. The phage population is vast and diverse, and each student can isolate a new bacteriophage with novel genes and features. Students can thus discover, name, purify, amplify, and genomically characterize a limitless number of new bacteriophages. We have developed several structured programs for delivering this phage discovery and genomics platform, of which the largest is the Science Education Alliance Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science (SEA-PHAGES) program starting in 2008. The SEA-PHAGES program trains and supports individual institutions to deliver phage discovery and genomics courses to primarily first-year undergraduate students, and a total of over 30,000 students have participated. This year there are over 140 participating institutions ranging from two-year community colleges to major research universities, primarily in the US but also in Nigeria, Mexico, New Zealand, and Canada. The SEA-PHAGES program has produced a collection of over 17,000 individual phages of which over 3,000 are fully sequenced and annotated. Assessment data shows that SEA-PHAGES participation stimulates student engagement and persistence in science, and that these gains are enjoyed broadly among all demographic groups. SEA-PHAGES is an example of an inclusive Research Education Community (iREC), a transformative new model for science education.