Social Sciences
Anthropology | Economics | Education | History | Political Science | Psychology | Sociology
Anthropology
Mark Auslander
Research Interests: Art, ritual and globalization. Religion. Kinship. Historical anthropology. Development. Africa. and the African Diaspora. United States.
Qualifications: Experience with ethnographic and oral historical research
Responsibilities: Researching the cultural history of Waltham, museum related project, work on immigrant and historically excluded communities.
Sophia Malamud
Research Interests: Linguistics and Anthropology.
Qualifications: Ling 100 is necessary; potentially other linguistics or computer science courses depending on the task. For one of the projects, knowledge of German at native or near-native level.
Responsibilities: Data entry, data collection, data analysis using computer tools.
Economics
Can Erbil
Research Interests: Development Economics. Economic Modeling (on CGE). International Trade (with a focus on Trade Liberalization and Tax Reforms). Political Economy.
Qualifications: ECON 2A, ECON8 B, REQUIRED; ECON 80A, 83, 82B, preferred; ECON 184B, plus.
Responsibilities: Data collection/manipulation, literature survey, graphs.
Kathryn Graddy
Research Interests: Applied microeconomics. Empirical industrial organization.
Qualifications: Some statistics or econometrics would be useful, but not necessary.
Responsibilities: Putting together data sets
Adam Jaffe
Research interests: Intellectual property policy and its effects; public policy in support of innovation, particularly with respect to environmental and energy technology; economic impact of publicly funded research; evaluation/assessment of government technology programs.
Qualifications: Knowledge of introductory economics and familiarity with statistical software
Responsibilities: depends on specific project
Education
Tara Brown
Research Interests: Race, class and gender in education. Urban alternative education.
Qualifications: Excellent writing and analytic thinking skills; experience with qualitative research methods (e.g. conducting interviews and/or observations); knowledge of high-minority; high-poverty urban schools and communities (can be from personal experience), knowledge of K-12 school suspension, expulsion, or dropout (can be from personal experience); attention to detail; reliability; desire to develop research skills
Responsibilities: Transcribing interviews as well as assisting in conducting interviews and observations related to secondary education; analyzing primary and secondary qualitative data; writing up data; presenting at educational research and practitioner conferences
History
Paul Jankowski
Research Interest: Modern European and French history.
Qualifications: Ability to read original source material in French or German.
Responsibilities: Reading and translation of primary source materials, in particular newspapers from the past, in French or German.
Jane Kamensky
Research Interests: North America before ca. 1830. Cultural history. The writing of history.
Qualifications: Experience doing interviews and submitting writing samples.
Responsibilities: Primary source research in online collections such as early American newspapers, or early English books, or archives-based research in particular collections of letters, etc.
Political Science
Steven Burg
Research Interests: Comparative ethnic conflict, and conflict mediation and resolution, focused on Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Qualifications: At least a sophomore status and completion of at least two courses in Politics, with strong preference for having completed Politics 15a and Politics 127b or 151a. Strong library research skills and outstanding writing skills. Fluency in Spanish or French for research purposes, knowledge of EXCEL, and/or knowledge of SPSS, are each highly desirable but not required.
Responsibilities: Tasks might include (depending on qualifications) compilation of research bibliographies addressing questions of theory or specific cases of ethnic conflict; preparation of critical reviews of above literature; review of original newspaper and other sources (if language capable); writing case studies of ethnic conflict; participating in analysis of national survey data from selected countries, examining various issues in ethnic conflict.
Kerry Chase
Research Interests: International Relations, particularly International Political Economy and US Foreign Economic Policy.
Qualifications: Undergraduate research assistants should have taken at least one of the professor's courses (POL 173A; POL 172B; POL 165A; POL 15A; IGS 10A) or have prior coursework on international economic issues (e.g. EC 60B; EC 160A). Students also should be comfortable working with Microsoft Excel, SPSS, and/or STATA.
Responsibilities: Data collection, organization, and management; locating, reading, and summarizing primary documents and government publications.
Jill Greenlee
Research Interests: American Politics, Political Behavior, Political Socialization, Public Opinion, Women and Politics, and Research Methods
Qualifications: Analytical thinking and writing skills; research skills Useful skills: knowledge of Excel, or SPSS or Stata.
Responsibilities: Creating annotated bibliographies/literature reviews of academic literature. Data management. Transcription of interviews. Content analysis of news coverage/political speeches.
Jytte Klausen
Research Interests: Comparative politics. Immigration and social cohesion. Europe.
Qualifications: Proficiency in Excel, SPSS, network analysis, foreign languages (French, German, Arabic)
Responsibilities: Directed research using foreign language sources, coding, data analysis.
Psychology
Angela Gutchess
Research Interests: Effects of age and culture on memory and social cognition.
Qualifications: The ability to interact with research participants in a professional & friendly manner, attention to detail, enthusiasm for research topics. Students should have completed relevant coursework in Psychology &/or Neuroscience. Statistics and research methods would be helpful for advanced students (juniors/seniors).
Responsibilities: Preparation of experimental stimuli and protocols using provided software; data collection; data analysis; literature searches.
Derek Isaacowitz
Research Interests: Emotion and Aging. Research focuses on emotion in adulthood and old age. In particular, he is interested in the interplay of cognitive processes, particularly attention, and emotion through the adult lifespan.
Qualifications: Psychology major, some undergraduate psychology coursework completed.
Responsibilities: Running subjects, data processing and organization, lit searches.
Margie Lachman
Research Interests: Life-span development; midlife; aging; sense of control; adult personality; memory; health-promoting behaviors; intervention research to improve cognitive and physical functioning.
Qualifications: Some background in Psychology is desirable. Course work in statistics and research methods is very helpful.
Responsibilities: Help with bibliographic searches, preparation of testing materials, data coding, checking heart rate and respiration data for artifacts, scheduling of research participants, scoring personality and cognitive tests, data entry.
Irene Pepperberg
Research Interests: Expertise in animal behavior, animal cognition, comparative psychology; specialty subjects are Grey parrots.
Qualifications: Some background in animal behavior/psychology/biology, is preferred but we can train students.
Responsibilities: Students will be responsible for training and testing Grey parrots on studies involving communication and cognition. Some basic "housekeeping", however, is involved...feeding and some caretaking, depending on the time of day the student is working.
Nicolas Rohleder
Research Interests: Acute and chronic psychosocial stress.
Responsibilities: Undergraduates can take up different responsibilities in the lab. On the dry lab side, they would be asked to interview and instruct study participants, gather and enter questionnaire data, schedule participants, and manage different kinds of electronic data acquisition equipment. In the wet lab, students will have the opportunity to learn different laboratory techniques, such as preparation of plasma and saliva samples for hormone analysis, sterile cell culture work, measurement of immune cell numbers, and a lot more.
Malcolm Watson
Research Interests: Developmental psychology, aggression.
Qualifications: Completion of PSYC 33a and PSYC 51.
Responsibilities: Help in collecting and developing measurement instruments to conduct research on the development of aggression in children and adolescents; collecting data from children; setting up data files.
Jutta Wolf
Research Interests: Molecularmechanisms that connect inflammatory processes to stress and depression.
Qualifications: Having attended the Health Psych class or Research Methods 52a may be helpful for the student, but is not a requirement.
Responsibilities: From planning the details of the study to actually running participants and working with the data collected. Also, students can acquire wet lab skills, if interested.
Ellen Wright
Research Interests: Depression. Emotion Regulation. Gender and gender differences. Development (particularly adolescent development).
Qualifications: For lab group experience - having either Developmental Psychology or Adolescence is mandatory. In addition, the professor supervise Psyc 93s (stats and research methods recommended but not required) and 99s (qualifying for psychology department honors, research methods, and statistics required).
Responsibilities: Anything from helping various lab members with conducting research, to doing a research project independently or a psychological review style paper in the area of internalizing disorders, gender, and development.
Leslie Zebrowitz
Research Interests: Social psychology; face perception; facial stereotypes (babyfaceness, attractiveness); age and gender stereotypes.
Qualifications: Preferably the student will have completed Psychology 51 (Statistics) and 52 (Research Methods), although exceptions are made.
Responsibilities: Preparation of experimental stimuli and protocols using provided software; data collection; data analysis; literature searches.
Sociology
Wendy Cadge
Research Interests: Sociology of Religion, Culture, Health and Medicine, Immigration, Gender, Sexuality, Research Methods, Buddhism.
Qualification: Good organizational skills, ability to meet deadlines, comfort using online library databases, ability to quickly learn basic bibliographic and data software.
Responsibilities: It depends on the project. The goal is to have students as involved in the research process as they would like to be.
Karen Hansen
Research Interests: Contemporary families; community studies; historical sociology; feminist theory; and sociology of gender.
Qualifications: Interest in sociology and U.S. history, experience in creative and thorough bibliographic searching, tenacity. Class in research methods would be helpful but not required. Interest in early- twentieth century immigration issues and in Native American history.
Responsibilities: Library bibliographic search, Management of EndNote files; correspondence to archives, web searching for archival sources; reading historical newspapers on microfilm.
Shulamit Reinharz
Research Interests: Jewish women's studies. History of women in sociology. Sociology of work. Qualitative and feminist methodology.
Responsibilities: There are numerous research projects going on, and there are always opportunities for undergraduates to be involved.
Qualifications: Language skills in Dutch and German.
Sara Shostak
Research Interests: Sociology of Health and Illness, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology of the Body, Social and Ethical Dimensions of Genetics, Environmental Health and Justice Movements, Qualitative Research Methods.
Qualifications: Students are expected to have completed a research methods course in sociology (e.g., soc 118a, soc 181a, soc 183a) or to have completed course work in a directly related substantive area (soc 117a, soc 189a, soc 193a).
Responsibilities: Research tasks/responsibilities would include organizing and coding qualitative data, conducting literature reviews, tracing trends in media coverage of specific topics, working with me on writing projects.