Dietrich College Research Training Program

79-198 E: The Art and Science of Making Medieval Manuscripts

Instructor: Alexandra Garnhart-Bushakra

Making medieval manuscripts involves a type of alchemy, which bridges techniques associated today with fine artistry and scientific experimentation. Even the word "manuscript" emphasizes our ability to create through a physical act, where manus (“hand”) and scriptus (“written”) must come together to commit one’s ideas to the page and, eventually, posterity. Indeed, a manuscript served multiple purposes: Its text not only revealed hidden truths to its intended readers, but its illustrations, miniatures, marginalia and also lettering represented a set of skills that scribes passed down from one to another over many generations. In the pre-modern era (i.e., before the 1500s C.E.), books emerged as objects of prestige, and both their display and circulation became priorities to those fortunate enough to possess them.

In this course, students will have the opportunity to study — and ultimately, make — their own manuscripts, all while learning more about medieval attitudes towards natural history, reading cultures across the Mediterranean world, and “bestsellers” that long predated the printing press. This project will introduce students to the hands-on process of creating a manuscript from beginning to end: Students will be expected to review primary and secondary sources; to prepare materials such as historical inks, pigments, dyes, waxes and foils; to practice calligraphy and illumination design; and to learn about the history of scripts through a brief primer of paleography. Participants can also assist in the development of teaching materials for the course. Knowledge of the Greek alphabet, Latin abbreviations and/or French may be helpful, but such expertise is not necessary to succeed in this class.

Maximum Number of Students: 3

85-198 C: Cigarette Smoking Study

Instructor: Kacey Creswell

The purpose of this study is to better understand characteristics of regular smokers, including cognitive processes, mood and other related variables.

Maximum Number of Students: 2 to 3

Application: Email Greta Lyons, glyons@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

85-198 G: CMU Cognitive and Social Development Lab

Instructor: Catarina Vales

The Cognitive and Social Development Lab at CMU is looking for students who are reliable and dependable, have an eye for detail, enjoy working in a team, and who are curious about developmental and cognitive science. All lab members are required to complete clearances to work with minors. The lab works hard to provide an environment where everyone is welcome and safe.

Undergraduate research assistants have the opportunity to contribute directly to ongoing research projects, including:

• Data collection with children participants
• Performing systematic literature reviews and data extraction for meta-analyses
• Coding and analyzing behavioral and survey data
• Conducting corpus analyses of language data.

Undergraduate research assistants often work in the lab for multiple semesters and with increased experience there are opportunities for leading projects.

Relevant prior experiences/qualifications include:

• Experience working with children
• Experience with data wrangling/analysis and visualization (preferably in R)
• Experience with text scraping
• Knowledge of programming languages (e.g., Python)
• Skills/knowledge in art and graphic design (or other relevant experience)
• Experience reading and summarizing empirical papers in psychology, cognitive science or related fields
• Experience with survey platforms/experiment builders (e.g., Qualtrics, Gorilla)

Application: Email Lab Manager Molly Niehaus, mniehaus@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

85-198 A: Cognitive Neuroscience Research

Instructor: Abigail Noyce

The Lab in Multisensory Neuroscience studies how humans perceive, understand, and use sensory input. We ask questions like "how do you know which sounds are important to listen to?" and "how do you cope with being interrupted?" and "what kinds of information are stored in memory, and how does that change?" Students will assist with one or more ongoing research projects depending on lab needs at the time. 

Undergraduate RAs assist with some or all of:

• Creating stimuli and designing experimental tasks
• Implementing experimental tasks on computer platforms
• Interacting with research participants and managing data collection
• Collecting neurophysiological data such as eyetracking or EEG
• Analyzing experimental data to produce statistical results and data visualizations
• Reading and summarizing the primary research literature in a relevant area
• Writing descriptions of experimental methods and results
• Assisting with ongoing lab maintenance and administrative work
• Assisting other lab members by serving as a pilot participant in their experiments

Maximum Number of Students: 3

Application: Email Dr. Abigail Noyce, anoyce@andrew.cmu.edu, with a resume, a brief description of your interests, and a note about the program where you saw this advertisement.

84-198 A: Coups D'etat, Mercenaries, and U.S. Military Exercises

Instructor: John Chin

John Chin is seeking research assistants for one or more political science research projects. One set of projects involves investigating, writing historical narratives and coding data on:

• the sordid post-World War II history of coup plots (conspiracies to depose leaders that are not actually attempted, perhaps because the regime discovered and thwarted them)
• the pre-World War II history of coup attempts
• or the post-World War II history of mercenary attacks.

A second project involves coding data on U.S. joint military exercises since the 1970s to understand the evolution of U.S. military diplomacy and deterrence priorities.

Other projects related to sharp power, democratic backsliding, and/or civil resistance and nonviolent revolutions may be available upon inquiry.

82-198 A: Documentation and Archiving of Nanamui

Instructor: Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon

Nanamui rituals are a sacred cultural tradition practiced in Miyakojima, Okinawa, Japan. The goal of this project is to document and archive this endangered ritual practice in ways that are ethically grounded, culturally respectful, and accessible to the community.

I am seeking a student collaborator who is interested in language documentation, digital archiving, and community-engaged research. The student will assist with organizing metadata, contributing to website design, and developing strategies to ensure the project’s long-term sustainability and community orientation. This project is well suited for students interested in digital humanities, archival practices, and collaborative research with Indigenous and local communities.

Note: This work will be done remotely throughout the semester.

Application: Email Dr. Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon, kfujinag@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

85-198 C: Drinking in Young Adult Duos (DYAD) Study

Instructor: Kacey Creswell

The purpose of this research study is to gain a better understanding of alcohol use in couples. Young adult couples will be asked to come into the lab to fill out surveys and drink an alcoholic beverage together.

Maximum Number of Students: 2 to 3

Application: Email Greta Lyons, glyons@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

76-198 C: Energy Futures and Environmental Risk: Positive Discourse in the Rustbelt and Appalachia Regions

Instructor: Barbara George

Sections of the Rust Belt intersect with the Appalachian region, and both areas have known issues of poverty, population loss and long-term environmental concerns, linked to short-term extractive economies: coal, steel, hydraulic fracking, which continues with the recent advent of the rise of proposed AI datacenters in this region.This study explores a work in progress of a linguistic analysis of communication patterns of extraction in these regions. First, past activity of layered environmental injustices that recur in Rust Belt and Appalachian locales are explored through ideological extraction lenses. The study interrogates language frames that often lead to humans and environmental exploitation – particularly apparent in the “inevitability” often seen in AI development discourse. The study also details an interventionist application of language used by the nonprofit group ReImagine Appalachia. This group communicates “movement” from past extractive ideology to renewables through environmental justice and eco-feminist communication patterns towards a sustainable vision of the Rust Belt and Appalachia regions, focused on inclusive and environmentally just practices.

Students will be responsible for:

• Identification and gathering datasets of current discourse, including government sites and the ReImagine Appalachia site (and transcripts of meeting recordings)
• Attending ReImagine Appalachia online meetings
• Initial analysis of coding scheme (general themes of discourses from various datasets)
• Pilot application of coding schemes for various datasets

Maximum Number of Students: 2

79-198 C: Environmental Justice and Human Rights in Latin America/Justicia Ambiental y Derechos Humanos en América Latina

Instructor: John Soluri

My research focuses on historical and contemporary connections between social and environmental change linked to commodity production in Latin America. Current research projects focus on small-scale coffee farmers and biodiversity in Central America, the role of animals in transportation systems, and environmental conflicts in Patagonia. I am open to student-initiated projects too. Curiosity is essential; ability to read and/or speak Spanish a big plus!

Application: Email John Soluri, jsoluri@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

85-198 D: How Learning Works

Instructor: Paulo Carvallo

How do people learn? What keeps students motivated to learn? How do students make learning decisions and what gets in the way? And how can we leverage our scientific understanding of the learning process to improve educational outcomes? This course involves hands-on experience answering these questions. You will contribute to ongoing projects as part of a team of researchers working to develop and run laboratory and classroom studies, analyze data from studies and existing large educational data, and contribute to the development of computational models of human learning and motivation.

Maximum Number of Students: 3

Application: Email Dr. Paulo Carvalho, pcarvalh@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

82-198 A: Language and Mental Health

Instructor: Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon

This study examines the relationship between pragmatic competence and factors such as gender identity, sexual orientation, and perceived discrimination among Japanese heritage language speakers.

I am seeking a student collaborator who is interested in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and/or language and mental health. The student will assist in designing and implementing a pragmatics assessment using Qualtrics, as well as contributing to data collection and analysis. This project is particularly well-suited for students interested in research design, survey methodology, and the intersection of language and identity.

Note: This work will be done remotely throughout the semester.

Application: Email Dr. Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon, kfujinag@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

84-198 B: Latin America: What Everyone Needs to Know

Instructor: Ignacio Arana

Ignacio Arana, assistant professor at CMIST, is developing a book that offers an accessible, engaging overview of Latin America’s past, present and future. The project explains why the region matters globally, how its history has shaped contemporary politics and society, and what major trends will define Latin America in the decades ahead. Research assistants will help synthesize scholarship and gather information across a wide range of topics — including history, politics, economics, culture and international relations.

Tasks will involve reviewing academic and journalistic sources, summarizing key debates, identifying illustrative examples, and verifying facts related to themes such as colonial legacies, coups and constitutions, inequality, migration, social movements, populism, and the region’s role in global affairs. RAs will gain hands-on experience working with interdisciplinary materials, developing research summaries and contributing to a major book project aimed at general audiences. Students with strong writing skills, curiosity about Latin America, or experience in area studies, history or political science are encouraged to apply.

Maximum Number of Students: 4

Application: Email Dr. Ignacio Arana, iarana@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

82-198 B: Latin American Comics Archive

Instructor: Felipe Gomez

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 engage critically in: editing, marking up and structuring digitized Latin American comics; 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).

Maximum Number of Students: Open to one or more students with at least low-intermediate level reading skills in Spanish. 

Application: Email Dr. Felipe Gomez, fgomez@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

80-198 A: Phonetics/Phonology Interface & Typology (Ph2IT)

Instructor: Christina Bjorndahl

The Phonetics/Phonology Interface & Typology (Ph2IT) Lab conducts production and perception experiments on human speech to better understand cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the speech systems of the world's languages. Research assistants can be involved in running research participants and analyzing phonetic data. Prior experience with linguistics and/or speech analysis is beneficial, but it is not necessary to have taken any advanced courses, as highly motivated students can be trained within the lab.

Priority will be given to, in order:

• Linguistics majors/minors
• LCAL/Psych majors/minors with an interest in speech
• Dietrich students
• the remainder of the student population

Application: Email Dr. Christina Bjorndahl, cbjorn@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

82-198 A: Phonetic Study of the Ikema Dialect of the Miyako Language

Instructor: Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon

The Ikema dialect of the Miyako language is a severely endangered Ryukyuan language spoken in Okinawa, Japan. It features typologically rare and understudied phonetic phenomena, including voiceless nasals and a complex tonal system.

I am seeking a student collaborator who is interested in phonetics and language documentation. The student will learn how to use Praat to annotate and analyze acoustic data collected during my fieldwork. This is an excellent opportunity for students who would like hands-on training in phonetic analysis and endangered language research.

Application: Email Dr. Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon, kfujinag@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

76-198 A: Recovering 19th c. Abolitionist, Underground Railroad, and early Anti-Racist Activism: Digital Archival Research & Corpus Building

Instructor: Courtney Novosat

I am working on three related projects requiring digital and potentially some physical archival research work. (Going to the physical archive is NOT a requirement; students may be welcomed to attend.)

Project 1: Tracing lives and accounts of lesser-known conductors of the Pennsylvania Underground Railroad for the expansion of a Underground Rail Road Museum I am on the board of. Research will be centered on ~30 counties in PA.

Project 2: Gathering abolitionist speaking engagements along the Rust Belt, from OH, through PA, into PA. Seeking records of events, speeches, speakers, accounts of speeches. 

Project 3: Linked by activism; current book project is examining sites of activist response among Black and Indigenous speakers at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition (which notable excluded organized participation by Black Americans). 

Students will be responsible for searching digital archives, cataloging finds and potentially traveling to local archives. 

Maximum Number of Students: 2 

Application: Complete the application form for Recovering 19th c. Abolitionist, Underground Railroad and Anti-Racist Activism

88-198 G: Research Training in Behavioral Sciences

Instructor: Julie Downs

This course provides students with research training and experience in the area of decision science. Students will get training with commonly used tools including Qualtrics for building online surveys, spreadsheets for managing data, producing basic statistical output, and an introduction to the statistical package R for data visualization and reports. Most training will happen through self-paced tutorials, with the opportunity to put these skills to work helping with ongoing projects or creating a sample project of their own. Motivated students can turn this training experience into ongoing independent research in future semesters with relevant faculty.

Maximum Number of Students: 6

Application: More information and an application form are available on Julie Downs' research website.

85-198 K: The Role of Metacognition in the Development of Reading and Comprehension

Instructor: Erik Thiessen

Children’s cognitive skills develop rapidly from toddlerhood to primary school. Between ages three and six, children’s communication, problem solving skills, formal reasoning abilities and social behavior all make rapid strides toward maturity. One of the key components of this developmental process is the ability to monitor one’s own thinking, referred to as “metacognition”: thinking about thinking. This skill continues to be used throughout the lifespan, and individual differences in metacognition are predictive of outcomes in a wide variety of domains. Our goal in this project is to examine when and how children use metacognition, in particular in relation to feedback during problem solving, and comprehension of stories and conversations. This project involves a wide variety of different tasks, including creation of stimuli, interacting with children, collecting and analyzing data, and communicating results with other members of the lab and the university community.

Application: Email Dr. Erik Thiessen, thiessen@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.

79-198 A: Voting Rights in the United States

Instructor: Lisa Tetrault

Did you know that American citizens have no right to vote? None. The United States is one of the only constitutional democracies in the world that does not enshrine this right in its founding charter. Not only did the nation’s founders punt on creating one, social movements have also never succeeded in creating one. Yet we hear all the time about how different groups won the vote: Black men in 1870; women in 1920; everyone else in 1965. Again, nope. So what, then, have voting rights activists won over the centuries? And how and why has an affirmative right to vote never been achieved? This book project looks to answer those questions, starting with the U.S. Constitution and working forward to the present.

I’ll happily train all students on the skills needed. Work will be largely in digital sources. Class requires your commitment to work independently, as a lot is work you have to find time do on your own — to get in your weekly hours. In truth, that’s the hardest part of the class, the self-discipline. If you have that, or want to practice it, come join me in sorting out this history.

Maximum Number of Students: 2

Application: Email Dr. Lisa Tetrault, tetrault@andrew.cmu.edu, explaining your interest in the research and including a copy of your resume.