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Undergraduate Research Opportunities

EREA: Early Research Experience Awards

The EREA offers lab experience and funding to first-year students.

Students majoring in either Communication and Speech Disorders (CSD) or Communication Studies (Comm Studies) are eligible to be included in the EREA program, which offers a paid opportunity to work in labs and research groups.

All first-year CSD and Comm Studies majors are invited to apply to the EREA program. If selected, they will be paired with a faculty mentor. This partnership allows students to contribute to research projects during the regular school year. EREA students gain hands-on experience in conducting research, data processing and analysis, or clinical experiences with patients.

EREA students engage with their faculty mentors to understand how their contributions impact their broader fields of study. Students may even continue to work in the lab through the summer quarter as long as the mentor agrees.

Early Research Experience Award (EREA) FAQs

The application portal has closed

Direct questions to soc-research@northwestern.edu

The following includes the EREA labs that are seeking undergraduate assistants for the 2024-2025 school year:

Communication Studies

  • Dr. T.J. Billard’s project, through the Center for Applied Transgender Studies, involves a citation network analysis of the multidisciplinary field of transgender studies, mapping its structure and identifying patterns of idea exchange across the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences. Skills that will be acquired: The EREA student will gain an intimate familiarity with the literature within the field of trans studies and learn both bibliometric and network analysis methods.
  • Dr. Jeremy Birnholtz offers the opportunity to work in the Social Media Lab at Northwestern on a project that explores how social media has emerged as a potential space for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals to regain control over their visibility. The work may also include assisting with editing/finalizing Dr. Birnholtz’s book manuscript, which draws on 10 years of research regarding self-presentation on social media, particularly in LGBTQ+ communities. Skills that will be acquired: interviewing techniques, data collection, editing.
  • Dr. Noshir Contractor’s SONIC research group invites an EREA student to work on a team that is doing research funded by NASA to help understand how astronaut crews will interact with one another on simulated long-duration missions and how these interactions impact their performance. Skills that will be acquired:  learn how to collect data from crew members using surveys they complete and data from crew engaging in team activities. The EREA student will use the collected data and literature review to formulate research questions and help coauthor a research paper. Note: Students are expected to attend weekly in-person SONIC lab meetings, which, during the Fall of 2024, will be on Tuesdays from 5 to 6 pm in the Frances Searle Building.
  • Dr. Noshir Contractor’s SONIC research group is also doing research funded by the Army Research Laboratory and Microsoft to help understand how humans interact with an AI teammate to solve problems and engage in creative brainstorming, and how these interactions impact their performance. Skills that will be acquired: 1) learn how to design an online experiment, 2) collect survey and digital trace data from teams of humans and AI (ChatGPT) agents, 3) help draft literature reviews on what we know about humans interacting with AI teammates, and 4) use the collected data and literature review to formulate research questions and help coauthor a research paper. Note: Students are expected to attend weekly in-person SONIC lab meetings, which, during the Fall of 2024, will be on Tuesdays from 5 to 6 pm in the Frances Searle Building.
  • Dr. Ignacio F. Cruz’s Communicating Expertise on TikTok in the OrgFutures Research Lab is a project that investigates how medical professionals use TikTok to construct and communicate their expertise, blending professional knowledge with personal branding. Skills that will be acquired: hands-on experience with qualitative research methods, such as conducting interviews, thematic coding, and analyzing data, to explore the evolving relationship between expertise and broader public knowledge creation.
  • Dr. Leslie DeChurch’s Renaissance Women: A leadership perspective on the the Medici women in Florence (1434-1537) investigates the leadership of six influential women from the Medici family, who are significant to Florence’s Renaissance. Through historiometric analysis, it examines how their leadership evolved and how they influenced the rise of the Medici from informal power to hereditary rule. Skills that will be acquired: 1)Historiometric research methods, 2)  Leadership theory application and analysis 3) Data coding and interpretation, 4) Team collaboration and training in research methodologies, and 5) Scholarly writing and case study development.
  • Dr. Nicholas Diakopoulos’s Generative AI tools for investigative journalism is part of the Newsroom Initiative, which involves prototyping tools to help investigative journalists sift through large sets of documents and uncover newsworthy findings. The EREA student will help identify examples of real-world investigative journalism projects and analyze the findings that came out of them, the documents that they relied on, and how they approached their reporting. Skills that will be acquired: critical analysis within the context of investigative journalism, task analysis for generative AI workflows, data processing.
  • Dr. Rayvon Fouche’s Hype, Sneaker Culture, and Digital Marketplaces examines digital sneaker marketplaces (StockX, Flight Club, eBay, etc.) to map, track, and assess the longitudinal relationships between price, marketing, and rhetorical traffic on digital forums to understand the evolution of sneaker hype. The intent of this research is to understand how the components of hype–scarcity, design, aesthetics, pleasure, and acquisitiveness–feed social and cultural desires for sneakers. Skills that will be acquired: humanities and social science critical analysis.
  • Dr. Duri Long’s Every Body Dance Now: Perspectives for HCI from Physically Integrated Dance involves working with dancers who use assistive technologies (predominately wheelchairs) to understand the ways they use their assistive devices during dance collaborations with non-disabled dancers and how that might be applied to augmented reality, virtual reality, and human-AI collaboration. Skills that will be acquired: analyzing interviews, qualitative analysis, qualitative coding (no prior experience required), thematic analysis, and research planning using tools like atlas.TI.
  • Dr. Yingdan Lu is offering an EREA student the opportunity to work in her Computational Multimodal Communication Lab, which offers diverse research opportunities on projects that explore digital technology, political communication, and information manipulation (e.g., misinformation, disinformation, propaganda). Skills that will be acquired: content analysis, literature review, and data validation while working closely with PhD students and faculty. Mandarin Chinese a plus.
  • Dr. Sulafa Zidani’s project is based in global communication and power, specifically focusing on how digital media content like memes is involved in transnational cultural dynamics. Students will map secondary sources about digital media content and organize the literature into a database as a basis for bibliography and literature review.  Skills that will be acquired: finding sources, determining their relevance and reliability, structuring a literature review,  time management, finding and identifying research topics, the difference between primary and secondary sources, and more. (Note: additional language skills a plus.)

 

Communication Sciences and Disorders

 

Early Research Experience Awards for Class of 2027 Students, their mentors, and their projects (2023-2024)