SPARK Mentors, Mentees, and Projects for Academic Year 2026-2027
(listed alphabetically by PI)
Apply for the 2026-27 SPARK cohort here!
Comm Studies Projects
“Web Science at Twenty: Building a Global Lab Network for the AI Era” – Noshir Contractor
The student will trace how the Web Science Trust’s global network grew to twenty labs across three continents, then help build community among them: web, social media, and AI-assisted content, events, and outreach that articulate and market what web science means in an AI-infused world. The student will build web, social media, and AI skills in service of a live strategic problem: strengthening the community among the twenty WSTNet labs.
Tasks include researching and curating the network’s twenty-year record; producing web content for WSTNet and the ACM Web Science Conference; developing outreach that connects labs to each other and to wider audiences; learning how a research community builds and sustains attention; using generative AI for research synthesis, drafting, and content production; and learning where those tools help and where they mislead. Underneath the tools, the student will learn how a vision for a field is articulated, tested with stakeholders, and communicated.
“How Artificial Intelligence Changes Teamwork” – Leslie DeChurch
How does generative AI change the way people work together? This project examines teams completing collaborative tasks with and without AI assistance. We will study how AI changes team processes, including how members develop ideas, coordinate their work, make decisions, and combine human and AI contributions.
The student will learn behavioral research methods, research design, data management, qualitative coding, and analysis of team interaction. They will help organize and document repeated team-task data, develop reliable coding procedures, identify behavioral patterns, and learn how observations become evidence used to develop and test research questions about teams and AI.
“Women, Leadership & Place” – Leslie DeChurch
How is women’s leadership made visible—or invisible—in place? This project maps the lives and leadership of women connected to Tuscany, examining where they exercised agency, the institutions they navigated, and the physical traces of their lives that remain. We will examine how place shapes how women’s leadership is remembered.
The student will learn historical and archival research methods, systematic source collection, qualitative analysis, and research documentation. They will develop skills in tracing people across primary and secondary sources, mapping relationships among people, institutions, and places, and identifying patterns in how women’s leadership is represented, remembered, or absent from historical narratives.
“The AI Accountability Review” – Nicholas Diakopoulos
The AI Accountability Review (AIAR) is a translational research project that seeks to reach policymakers with syntheses of the latest research on AI accountability. The goal for SPARK is to curate a database of policymakers who might be receptive to incorporating AIAR outputs into their policymaking. The student will work on online research of relevant individuals; organization and curation of data; literature review; AI policy issue review; and online publication marketing.
“What Makes a Team? Fan Perceptions of Team Identity in Contemporary College Sport” – Susan Dun
How do fans define a team when athletes can transfer more freely and build personal brands through NIL? This project uses survey research to examine fan perceptions of team identity, athlete loyalty, belonging, and connection to college sport in a rapidly changing athletic landscape. Students will learn about survey design and research methods; literature reviews and academic database searching; data collection and management; basic quantitative data analysis; resarch ethics and human subjects research; and professional communication and teamwork.
“My Roman Empire” – Rayvon Fouché
My Roman Empire is a podcast exploring the ideas, media, people, technologies, and cultural moments we cannot stop thinking about. We are looking to work with undergraduate researchers to help uncover compelling stories, investigate cultural obsessions, develop episodes, and translate research into engaging conversations about media, identity, technology, politics, memory, and popular culture. The ideal student is one who is motivated and excited about storytelling.
“Discerning AI and Cultural Bias” – Rayvon Fouché
How does bias impact our evolving AI landscape? Existing bias evaluation methods assume static model behavior and do not account for personalization or memory. We are interested in new testing frameworks that assess bias and draw upon social and cultural survey data to develop a bias mitigation tool.
“Measuring Conflict Ripeness: Multilingual Analysis of Media Discourse, War, and Negotiation” – Olga Kamenchuk Nisbet
This project examines whether large-scale multilingual news data can reveal when armed conflicts are becoming more conducive to negotiation. Students will help validate computational measures of conflict costs, military limits, diplomacy, settlement, and escalation across languages, initially studying the Armenia–Azerbaijan and Russia–Ukraine wars.
Students will learn the fundamentals of computational social science and multilingual text analysis, including systematic content analysis, developing and validating coding schemes, evaluating computational text measures, conducting literature reviews, and interpreting longitudinal media data. Students with proficiency in Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Turkish, French, German, or Polish will also have opportunities to work with texts in those languages, but NO specific language background is required.
“Sounding authentic: how audio processing shapes political attitudes and voting intentions” – Yingdan Lu
This project examines how processed versus natural political speech influences audiences. Through experiments, we test whether audio processing changes perceived authenticity, credibility, candidate evaluations, and voting intentions, providing evidence on how increasingly common forms of audio manipulation may shape political persuasion. The student will gain experience with content analysis, experiment methods, and literature review.
“Visual Politics of Leadership in Authoritarian Regimes” – Yingdan Lu
This is a project studying the visual representations of Chinese leaders in newspapers over the past decades. We are interested in how power dynamics and intimacy in the visuals shift across different times and different leaderships. The student will work on content analysis and LLM-assisted computational social science methods.
“An article or book chapter on the Media and Public Trust” – Rick Morris
This is individual guided research, not lab-based and involves library research on the media, media industry, public policy, and existing theories of media trust, and I will be working on new ideas. The student will learn how to do industry & business and policy & law research.
“Political Influencers and the New Logics of Persuasion: An Experimental Comparison with Traditional Political Media” – Erik Nisbet
This study experimentally compares how political influencers, journalists, and politicians persuade audiences. Using a 3×2 experiment, we manipulate the visual, audio, and textual features associated with each source’s media logic while holding the actor and information constant, testing their effects on message credibility, issue attitudes, and issue involvement. Students will learn how to conduct and write a literature review, develop and test experimental stimuli, and run statistical analysis, guided by faculty and graduate students.
“Cognitive alignment in human-AI teams” – Aaron Shaw
How do perceptions of AI capabilities impact collaboration in human-AI teams? This project proposes an experimental design to evaluate the effects of (mis)alignment between human perceptions of AI agent capabilities and AI agent actions on team performance.
Students will gain a combination of project-specific skills and general research experience: [1] Project specific: Searching, reading, and analyzing prior literature on human-AI teams and collaboration; supporting a PhD student investigator in research and experimental design. [2] General research experience: The student will join the Community Data Science Collective, an inter-university research group working in the computational and social sciences. As part of their role, the student will have opportunities to learn about other ongoing projects in the lab; participate in lab meetings/workshops; and support other ongoing projects involving qualitative, quantitative, and/or computational research methods.
“A cross-country study of purpose-oriented networks” – Michelle Shumate
When social problems are too large or unrelenting for single organizations to address, organizations often join purpose-oriented networks, organizational forms in which three or more organizations consciously affiliate with a network and jointly strive to achieve a social purpose (Nowell & Milward, 2022). This project conducts a three-year, multi-country, multi-method study of health and human service PONs to determine how environmental context shapes network configuration and performance. This project is underway – in the US will be recruit 24 health and human service PONs and 12 environmental PONs. Students will join a team that is both actively recruiting new PONs and already collecting data from PONs. Students will work on research recruitment, survey design, and qualitative and quantitative analysis.
“Down the Pre-Internet Rabbit Hole: Connecting Internet Memes to Their Conceptual Origin” – Sulafa Zidani
This project uses digital archival research to trace how the word “meme” transformed from a term that Richard Dawkins used in 1976 to describe the transmission of cultural units in a way similar to genes, into a term that refers to groups of digital content that circulate on the Internet. The student will learn about different databases for online research, including databases for newspaper articles, academic articles, and business periodicals. The student will participate in finding relevant information and organizing it for the purpose of the study.
CSD Projects
“Developing Aphasia-accessible Measures of Depression” – Sameer Ashaie
This project investigates how care partners of people with aphasia perceive and respond to questions adapted from the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5. The study aims to identify challenges and barriers in interpreting, answering, and representing patients’ experiences, informing strategies to improve the validity and accessibility of psychiatric assessments for people with aphasia. Students will learn skills in qualitative analysis and developing aphasia-accessible materials.
“Investigating individual differences in neural processing of speech” – Bharath Chandrasekaran
This project investigates individual differences in the neural processing of speech, with a focus on how auditory, cognitive, language experience, and attentional factors influence speech perception. Using behavioral and neurophysiological measures, including EEG, we aim to identify neural markers of speech-processing abilities and understand why some individuals experience greater difficulty understanding speech in adverse listening environments (e.g., busy restaurants). Students will study otoscopy (visual inspection of ear canal/eardrum), audiometry (hearing test), electrophysiology methods (multi-channel EEG), administration of behavioral listening tasks, data management, and more.
“Emotional Speech Communication with Cochlear Implants” – Monita Chatterjee
This project investigates vocal emotion (emotional prosody) perception and production by children and adults with cochlear implants. We focus on how differences in acoustic cue utilization by individual cochlear implant patients explain variability in emotion perception, and how acoustic cues heard by patients are reflected in their emotional productions. The student will train in scientific literature review, hypothesis testing, experimental design, data collection and management, data analysis, and presentation of findings.
“Analysis of neonate rat vocalizations to determine the impact of plasticity in neurodevelopmental disorders” – Adrian Contreras-Rodriguez
We have collected a database of neonate rat audio and video recordings to determine the impact of neonate anoxia. We would like to extend our analysis to a rat model of fragile X (FMR1 mutation). Students will gain skills in machine learning tools for image segmentation.
“Neonate rat transcriptome analysis”- Adrian Contreras-Rodriguez
We have an RNA sequence database from neonate rats from control and anoxia exposed groups. The goal is to apply statistical and bioinformatics tools to visualize and identify transcripts that change in response to anoxia. Students will gain experience with computational tools.
“Reliability of Auditory Thresholds” – Sumit Dhar
This project aims to assess the test-retest reliability of extended high-frequency behavioral hearing thresholds measured in MATLAB using an otoacoustic emission (OAE) probe placed in the ear canal, and to evaluate their agreement with thresholds obtained from clinical audiometry using circumaural headphones. The project’s findings will clarify the reliability of ear-canal-based measurements for estimating extended high-frequency thresholds, relative to conventional clinical audiometry. Students will gain experience in hearing science, inferential reasoning, and MATLAB.
“Music intervention to restore auditory processing and cognition following a concussion” – Jennifer Krizman
To investigate the ability of a music-based rehabilitation exercise to improve cognition and auditory processing following a concussion in children. Students will learn about pediatric concussion research; rhythm-based rehabilitation; longitudinal tracking of recovery; neurobehavioral assessment; translational neuroscience; intervention research; and interdisciplinary clinical research.
“Application of Digital Health Wearables for Assessment and Intervention of Swallowing Disorders” – Bonnie Martin Harris
This study explores wearable sensor technology for assessing and treating swallowing disorders. Wearable data may be compared against standardized videofluoroscopic swallow studies and patient-reported perception measures to evaluate the accuracy and usability of wearables as clinical assessment and intervention tools
The student will learn data organization and management, research documentation and data collection procedures, and basic statistical analysis; will be exposed to wearable sensor technology and digital health research; and become familiar with videofluoroscopic swallow study (VFSS) protocols.
“Validating a Novel Vocal Muscle Strength Task in Older Adults with Presbyphonia” – Mariah Morton-Jones
We are seeking to validate a new vocal fitness and determine if any anthropometric, body composition, or whole body fitness data may explain difference between vocally healthy older adults and those with presbyphonia. This is part of data collection for my R21 and the study will recruit people across the lifespan, both vocally healthy and those with age-related voice complaints. Student will learn: 1) how to obtain clinically useful acoustic and aerodynamic voice data for study participants, 2) analyze acoustic voice samples, 3) organize data collection and utilize RedCap.
“EmpowerEI” – Meg Roberts
This project tests the effects of different early intervention approaches for child and family outcomes. Students will learn observational coding of early language skills.
“Communication in older adults (1)” – Pamela Souza
Project 1 is analyzing results of a trial of over-the-counter hearing aids for adults experiencing both hearing loss and memory problems. This is a good match for someone interested in hearing/hearing aids or cognitive abilities such as executive function and working memory. The student may also learn how to administer, score and interpret cognitive tests; protect human subjects; manage and interpret research data; and work as part of a research team.
“Communication in older adults (2)” – Pamela Souza
Project 2 is focused on hearing aid processing and on how signal processing changes the acoustic properties of sound, including reducing noise or distorting speech cues. This is a good match for someone with interests in acoustics or signal processing. The student will learn to program and measure hearing aids; protect human subjects; manage and interpret research data; and work as part of a research team.
“Using automated tools to understand bilingual children’s language environments” – Adriana Weisleder
There has been rapid growth in automated tools for transcribing, annotating, and analyzing speech recordings (e.g., Whisper), yet application of these tools to naturalistic scenarios with multiple speakers; child speech; and multilingual speech is still underdeveloped. In this project, we will try to apply existing tools with human annotation to better understand bilingual children’s language environments. Students will learn: 1. Landscape of automated tools available for automated processing of speech recordings. 2. Transcription/annotation of child and adult speech. 3. Theoretical background on bilingual language development