Undergrad Research Training
Course Number: 82-198
These courses are designed to give eligible and interested students some hands-on research experience working on a faculty project or in a lab in ways that might stimulate and nurture the students' interest in doing more research. They are open to students who are Dietrich College, SHS, or BHA majors, double majors, and minors who will be second semester freshmen or sophomores during the semester they take the course.
FALL 2024 Section A: The Language of Pain
This interdisciplinary research looks at the exciting intersection of linguistics and medicine. Specifically, how we use language to express the severity of physical pain. The student will join a collaborative research team, which includes a linguist and pain doctor. The student will work with the team to help with the literature review on language and bodily pain. The student will also work to improve and develop questionnaires aimed at describing pain using simple pictures and words. Finally, the student will help carry out small pilot studies to test basic hypotheses related to language and pain. The ideal candidate is interested in medicine, language, and/or psychology.
Open to one or two students.
Interested students should send an email to Seth Wiener and include information about your interests in this project.
FALL 2024 Section B: Latin American Comics Archives
This project involves research of Latin American comics. The course will teach the basics of Comic Book Markup Language (CBML, a TEI-based XML vocabulary) for encoding and analyzing the structural, textual, visual and bibliographic complexity of digitized comic books and related documents. Student researchers will assist in: a) editing, marking up and structuring digitized Latin American comics; b) reading and subjecting these texts to interpretation, making inferences and embarking in theoretical explorations of issues according to given criteria.
Long-term results of this project entail possible inclusion of encoded materials in the Latin American Comics Archive (LACA), an award-winning Digital Humanities project; collaboration with national and international students and researchers; and perhaps a published work (for which student participants would be acknowledged as contributors).
Open to one or more students with at least low-intermediate level reading skills in Spanish.
Interested students should send an email to Felipe Gomez and include information about your interests in this project.
FALL 2024 Section C: Promoting Equity in Mental Health through Languages Access for Immigrants
Mental health services rely on language as the principal medium of diagnosis and treatment; patient-provider conversational alignment is consequential for immigrant health and wellbeing. Our project investigates multiple and specific facets of language assistance to inform best-practice guidelines and policy surrounding language access and interpreter services. Three key questions target: 1) assessment of patient-provider-interpreter concordance in emotional communication, 2) comparison of patient-provider concordance in language characteristics during multilingual medical conversations, and 3) evaluation of conversation characteristics and modality of interpreter services that yield best patient satisfaction, patient-provider alliance and psychological health outcomes for immigrant families. For the RTC program, students will work on literature review regarding multilingual language service in mental health practice.
Open to more than one student.
Interested students can send email to Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon to schedule an interview.
VIEW the Schedule of Classes for more details
Units: VAR
Prerequisite(s): None