The objective of the NSF-funded ILREUM project is to develop a laboratory for urban meteorology that includes a range of observational platforms, each designed for teaching and investigation of particular features of the urban boundary layer (UBL). The prime intellectual merit is the integrated design of these platforms, which fully utilizes new remote-sensing and in-situ measurement technologies as well as laboratory studies. Compared to previous studies, the novelty of the ILREUM approach is the combination of different technologies (in-situ and remote-sensing instruments, field and laboratory studies) to obtain high-resolution and long-term data of flow and turbulence within the lowest hundreds of meters of the UBL at sites representative of different land-use types. These data, in combination with data available from a number of recent urban field and laboratory campaigns will provide an excellent foundation for further improvement of surface-layer parameterization schemes. The paper will present an overview of the ILREUM research and educational activities since its start in 2006 and discuss some of the obtained results. These results include data from in-situ and sodar measurements on the observation deck of National Weather Center in Norman Oklahoma, as well from scintillometer studies at a sub-urban site. Additionally, some challenges of developing urban measurement platforms and of integrating hand-on teaching modules into the classroom are addressed.