Aurora's research mechanics are great, but they tend to require a lot more mouse clicks than necessary. Here are 3 quality of life suggestions that will help reduce mouse clicks and make assigning research a faster process:
1: "Matching Scientists Only" box should have memory of its state
When closing the window and reopening it, the game should remember if the "Matching Scientists Only" box was checked or unchecked.
So that you don't have to keep clicking it whenever you bring up the research screen. Having it based on memory seems like a better solution to me than making it the default, although personally I'd also be okay with it just being checked by default.
2: "Prioritise Project" button 
When you have a scientist selected who's already researching a research project, the "Create Project" button should turn into a "Prioritise Project" button. When you click this, the selected technology should become the scientist's current research and the previously researched technology should be moved to the top of the scientist's research queue. Every other tech in the scientist's queue will in turn be moved down by one.
Having this button would mean that you don't need to cancel a scientist's current project and their entire research queue, just because you want to reprioritise a different technology. This comes up often for me, especially when a prerequisite tech has been researched for a tech that I really want to research (or when a new component/unit design needs to be researched, see suggestion 3), but I don't want to cancel and re-assign scientist's research queue.
3: "Create & Assign" button for designs
This button would be added to the component, missile, turret and ground unit design screens (and in the class design screen for prototype components) in addition to the normal "Create" button. When it is clicked, the game picks the scientist with matching field and most labs, who's currently researching a project and assigns the research of this design to them in the same way that the "Prioritise Project" button would do. If no matching scientist can be found, pressing this button would give an error popup (or let you pick a scientist from a list).
Similar to suggestion 2, this button would save you from having to cancel a scientist's project and queue, just because you want to research this new component/unit ASAP. In addition, this would also make it so that you don't have to open the research menu and search for the new component/unit in the drop down lists.