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 for academic year 2024-2025 has closed.

Please send your direct questions to soc-research@northwestern.edu.

Below are the EREA students and the labs they matched with for academic year 2024-2025:

Communication Studies

• Chloe Hsu is working with Dr. TJ Billard on a project through the Center for Applied Transgender Studies. This project 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.
• Harper Barnowski is working with Dr. Jeremy Birnholtz 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. Harper may also assist 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.
• Chelsea Peng is working with Dr. Noshir Contractor’s SONIC research group, which 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.
• Serena Song is working with Dr. Noshir Contractor’s SONIC research group on 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.
• Selina Xu is working with Dr. Ignacio F. Cruz on a project called Communicating Expertise on TikTok in the OrgFutures Research Lab. This project investigates how medical professionals use TikTok to construct and communicate their expertise, blending professional knowledge with personal branding.
• Emily Jung is working with Dr. Leslie DeChurch on a project entitled Renaissance Women: A leadership perspective on the the Medici women in Florence (1434-1537). This lab investigates the leadership of six influential women from the Medici family, who are significant to Florence’s Renaissance. Through historiometric analysis, Emily will examine how their leadership evolved and how they influenced the rise of the Medici from informal power to hereditary rule.
• Ethan Silver is working with Dr. Nicholas Diakopoulos on a project called Generative AI tools for investigative journalism, which is part of the Newsroom Initiative. This project involves prototyping tools to help investigative journalists sift through large sets of documents and uncover newsworthy findings. Ethan 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.
• Karina Rosas is working with Dr. Rayvon Fouché on his Hype, Sneaker Culture, and Digital Marketplaces project. This lab 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. Karina will examine how the components of hype–scarcity, design, aesthetics, pleasure, and acquisitiveness–feed social and cultural desires for sneakers.
• Annabeth Lundberg is working with Dr. Duri Long on a project entitled Every Body Dance Now: Perspectives for HCI from Physically Integrated Dance. This lab 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.
• Violet Liu is working with Dr. Yingdan Lu 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).
• Amber Lu is working with Dr. Sulafa Zidani on a project 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.

Communication Sciences and Disorders

• Sofia Strohmeier is working with Dr. Viorica Marian on her project entitled Language co-activation and the lexical-semantic network in bilinguals: An EEG and eye-tracking co-registration study. Sofia will work on an EEG and eye-tracking co-registration study of bilingual language processing, assisting with EEG/eye-tracking fitting and testing of participants, recruiting and scheduling participants, and data processing.
• Yijin Dong is working with Dr. Bonnie Martin-Harris on a project that explores Research methods related to respiration and swallowing dynamics across the lifespan. Yijin will gain experience in research methods related to respiration, swallowing, and vocal systems. Yijin will be trained to acquire and interpret data from physiologic signals, build and maintain datasets, learn the basics of statistical analysis and coding, and assist with literature review and abstract preparation.
• Kumiko Long is working with Dr. Adrian Rodriguez Contreras’s project, Evaluating the impact of perinatal asphyxia in animal models of neonatal encephalopathy. In this project, Kumiko will join more experienced lab members in data collection and processing.
• Mira Patel is working with Dr. Mercedes Spencer on a project entitled Executive Function Skills in Children with Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit: A Meta-Analysis. This ongoing project (meta-analysis) aims to identify relations between cognitive-behavioral skills and reading comprehension in children with reading comprehension difficulties.