Eligibility
CHDLT Faculty Associates who have not received seed money within the last three years.
Research Opportunities
Welcome to the Doris Bergen Center for Human Development, Learning and Technologies (CHDLT) Undergraduate Research Assistant matching webpage. The CHDLT’s goal is to promote interdisciplinary research among Miami University faculty members and students. The purpose of this webpage is to improve the ability of faculty to find eager students wanting to gain research experience and to give students the ability to seek out faculty members they may or may not be familiar with.
Student Resources
The following information is for undergraduate students who are seeking research opportunities with faculty members.
The ASP Lab is accepting applications for research assistants for Fall of 2025!
The Affective Science & Psychophysiology Lab is looking for research assistants who are motivated to learn the research process, technical skillsets, and work in a team; dependable, organized, and able to meet deadlines; open to receiving feedback and committed to improving; have 10-12 hours of availability per week for at least two semesters.
Being an Undergraduate Research Assistant (URA) is a great opportunity for students to gain experience and skills valued by employers, graduate schools and medical schools. The role of the URA varies depending on the faculty members’ needs which is dependent on their research interests. Below is a list of faculty members accepting inquiries from interested students.
- Please copy and paste the email link provided to contact the faculty member.
- When contacting a faculty member, please include:
- Your name
- Year
- Major
- Say that you are responding to the CHDLT Research Opportunities page, as well as any additional items the faculty member requests.
I Am Actively Seeking Undergraduate Research Assistants
My research interests include maternal health research, including screening and barriers to receiving mental health care as well as perinatal grief experiences.
I Would Consider a Student as an Undergraduate Assistant
My research interests are centralized on professional school counseling with the hopes of decreasing the opportunity gap for students with disabilities (SWDs) and other marginalized students. I am working toward this goal through research collaborations that contribute to evidence-based practices that are applicable and accessible to school counselor practitioners. Specifically, my research has examined the role of school counselor trainees and their ability to serve SWDs. The study found that trainees relied heavily on prior disabilities knowledge to inform work with SWDs. I have expanded my research to explore the overall impacts of trauma on students and how school counselors can support students through trauma-informed schools.
The MARSH Lab's research examines the interplay between stress, close relationships, and health across the lifespan. In particular, our work identifies the psychological and biological mechanisms explaining how parent-child and romantic relationships affect physical health. Students interested in becoming a research assistant can reach out to be put on a mailing list for an RA application when the next RA search begins. Priority will go to psychology majors.
My research interests include Parental Incarceration.
My line of research focuses on teacher attention allocation and momentary decision-making through the lens of expertise. I use mobile eye-tracking technology to analyze expert and novice teachers’ gaze behavior by comparing eye movements during teaching tasks (e.g., live teaching, reading musical scores, watching videos of classroom scenes) to how participants talk about and construe their domain. Eye movements are windows into attention allocation, including unconscious processes that are highly automatized and often inaccessible to experts themselves, because expert thinking involves multiple levels of construal. Deploying this methodology in the analysis of teacher thinking is new to our field, and my research team and I are pioneering this approach to understanding how teachers perceive, process, and respond to information in ecologically valid contexts.
My research interests include, characteristics of high quality childcare for all children including those with behavior problems and disabilities, and non-traditional students and online teacher education.
My primary research interests are in the development of anxiety-spectrum outcomes in young children, and what it is like to parent children at risk for anxiety. I am working on an ongoing longitudinal study that examines temperamental risk for anxiety and parenting from age 1 to 6. I would be interested in developing collaborations with other faculty who do work in school readiness, as I am developing interests in how socioemotional development impacts adjustment to kindergarten. I am also interested in collaborating on projects related to emotion processes that occur in families.
The mission of the CALL Lab at Miami University is to identify barriers to young children’s acquisition of language and emergent literacy skills and to develop interventions for these skills that can be implemented feasibly in real-world settings.
Research draws upon critical sociospatial theories to take up issues of equity and justice within K-12 schooling and examine how "community" has been constructed and used.
Faculty Resources
The following information is for faculty who are looking for undergraduate students seeking a research opportunity and additional resources for their research.
Faculty Undergraduate Research Assistants (Faculty URAs)
The CHDLT is dedicating resources to help individual CHDLT Faculty Associates (FA) recruit, train, and utilize URAs from outside their home departments (with the purpose of promoting interdisciplinary work) to assist with any phase of the research process.
- On their own or with the help of the CHDLT Board, an FA will identify one or two undergraduates outside their home departments to serve as URAs.
- The student(s)will be formally enrolled for independent study research credit with the faculty member.
- The FA will propose a budget of up to $300 per student per year ($600maximum) to facilitate research and training. Admissible expenses include online training for students, books and other relevant research materials, software, student travel expenses to and from research sites, and participant incentives. Up to $100 per student may be used by faculty for their own professional development.
- The faculty member will acknowledge the CHDLT assistance in professional presentations and publications stemming from work conducted with the assistance of the URAs.
- Recipients will write a brief memo to the CHDLT co-directors at the end of the academic year in which the funds were used, not to exceed one page, describing the work students did, outcomes, and advice for future recipients.
Proposals will be reviewed on a rolling basis at regularly-scheduled CHDLT executive board meetings with no more than two awards being made in any given semester, each supporting up to two students.
Seed Money
The purpose of this funding opportunity is to provide CHDLT Faculty Associates with $500 seed money to prepare for writing strong grant proposals for external funding, such as resources to provide stipends for experts to review drafts of grant proposals, engage with grant writing consultants, or collect/analyze pilot data.
Application
Submit a 1-page application to the CHDLT executive board. The proposal should outline how the money would be spent, the nature of the specific research, and specify one or more specific Requests for Proposals or other funding mechanisms that are being pursued.
Requirements
Successful applicants must agree to make a brief presentation to the CHDLT Executive Board about how they spent the seed money within two years of receiving the seed grant. Applicants must agree to seek external research funding under the auspices of the CHDLT. Applicants are encouraged to take advantage of the CHDLT mentoring program and other resources in addition to the seed money program.
Notification
Applicants will be informed of the Executive board’s decision within a week after the subsequent board meeting.
Contact Us
Interested CHDLT members are welcome to contact us via email at chdlt@MiamiOH.edu or by contacting our Co-Directors
Kevin Bush
Email: bushkr@MiamiOH.edu
Phone: 513-529-0405
Office: McGuffey 207C
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056
Trace Poll
Email: pollgh@MiamiOH.edu
Phone: 513-529-2505
