Category: Research Assistant Opportunity

Professor: Gabriela Rosenblau
 
Department: Psychology
 
Title: Social learning in adolescence
 
Description: We are investigating social learning (learning about other people) over the course of adolescence using a multimodal approach (by combining behavioral assessments, eye-tracking and neuroimaging). Follow up studies will investigate how social learning shapes cooperation and how mechanisms for social learning differ in adolescents with autism. The successful candidate will be involved in all aspects of conducting experimental research: recruitment, preparing the experimental setups, conducting behavioral and neuroscientific experiments, data entry and assisting with data analysis. Aside from that, they will also help with other organizational laboratory tasks as required. They will be involved in weekly laboratory meetings and meetings / talks of the Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute at GW.
 
Duties: The candidate should have a research interest in social psychology, neuroscience, decision making, and neurodevelopment. The candidate ideally has some experience with designing and / or conducting psychological and neuroscientific research, and knowledge of statistics. Preference will be given to candidates, who have previously worked with children and/ or psychiatric populations and to candidates with basic programming skills.
 
Time commitment: 10 or more hours per week (average)
 
Credit hour option*: 3
 
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: grosenblau@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.

Professor: Jozef Przytycki
 
Department: Mathematics
 
Title: Knot Theory: Editing and Programming
 
Description: Knot Theory is a discipline of modern mathematics, part of topology (geometria situs).
Student(s) will assist me with editing programing and doing research in KnotTheory.
 
Duties: Students under my supervision will be involved in tasks as below:

1. Student would assist in preparing/editing research paper for arXiv submission (and eventual publication). Student has to learn LaTeX and how to draw figures in xfig or other similar program.
2. Many invariants of graphs and knots require pattern testing which require to wrote simple (or not that simple) programs. Also programs are needed to analyze simple algebraic structures related to knots.

 
Time commitment: 4-6 hours per week (average)
 
Credit hour option*: 2
 
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: przytyck@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.

Professor: Andrew Barr
Department: Anthropology
Title: Creating a comparative database of 3D models of African mammalian skeletons
Description: The goal of this project is to build a comparative database of 3D models of African mammalian skeletons. The student research assistant will learn all aspects of capturing, processing, and storing 3D data using a hand-held white-light scanner of the type used in many industrial applications (e.g., additive manufacturing and 3D printing) .
The anatomical models produced in this project will be used in identifying mammal fossils from the eastern African fossil record, as well as in studies of the functional adaptations of African mammals.  The broader goal is to understand the ecological context in which human evolution occurred over the past 3 million years in eastern Africa.
Duties: Assistant will be responsible for making 3D models of museum skeletal collections in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, at both the downtown Washington, DC location and the Suiteland, MD storage facility. Assistant must be competent in using a Window laptop, and be willing and able to learn 3D scanning protocol. Assistant will be expected to learn basic identification of skeletal elements of a variety of mammalian species. Assistant will be expected to to travel to museum locations and maintain curatorial standards while working with biological skeletal collections. If interested, assistant may be involved in the analysis and presentation of study results at national academic conferences.
Time commitment: 4-6 hours per week (average)
Credit hour option*: 2
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: wabarr@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.

 
Professor: Christopher Britt Arredondo
 
Department: RGSLL-Spanish and Latin American Literature
 
Title: Modern Translatio Imperii
 
Description: Focused on the various and often contradictory roles that intellectuals played in the transfer of imperial power from Spain to the United States at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this project involves research in the literary and political traditions of Spain, the United States of America, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Research will vary from reconstruction of broad historical contexts to detailed analyses of specific texts: mostly essays, but some fiction as well. Research will be conducted in Spanish and English.
 
Duties: Meet regularly to discuss research goals and progress. Consult archives in the Hispanic Reading Room at the LOC.  Identify, read, and provide written summary, including detailed quotes, of pertinent texts, documents, images.
 
Time commitment: 4-6 hours per week (average)
 
Credit hour option*: 2
 
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: cbritt@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.

Professor: Alexander Dent

Department: Anthropology

Title: Cellular Phones and Inequality in Washington DC

Description: In an era in which 95% of American adolescents across socioeconomic status (SES) have a cellular phone, most of which are “smartphones” capable of accessing an array of digital networks, it is tempting to believe that interconnection and access to information have equalized.  However, if you dig beneath the surface you find that profound differences exist with respect to access, reliability, and capacities for cell phone use as reflected in lived experience, including schooling and home life. This research proposes to explore how inequality persists in new forms through cellular telephony in Washington DC, a city that has a long history of inequality. In more detail, we seek to test the hypothesis that variations in cell phone practice impact rising inequality in schools and households.

Duties: Doing innovative research on digital technology. In more detail, data collection (interviews, observations, mapping, focus-groups); data analysis (coding, transcription); grant and article writing; brainstorming. We are looking for someone interested in media use, ethnography, and the relationship between theory and data.

Time commitment: 10 or more hours per week (average)

Credit hour option*: 3

Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: asdent@gwu.edu

*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.

Professor: Holly Dugan
 
Department: English
 
Title: The Famous Ape
 
Description: My book tells the story of the long history of aping, from the Renaissance to the modern era. Each chapter details the history of a famous ape from the past. My aim is to elevate these creatures to the status of biographical subject and to return to them some of their former fame, while still critiquing the mechanisms that defined and harmed them through their relationship to humans. It is my hope that doing so will inspire us to ask questions about our own relationship to simians—as performers, as test subjects, as pets, and as wild creatures. Why is it that there is very little change in taming strategies from the Renaissance to modernity? What do records of monkey-baiting in the Renaissance have to do with contemporary instances in the NFL? Who are our famous apes and what do they have to do with famous apes of the past?
 
I am seeking a research assistant to help me with the public-facing, digital-historical aspect of this project. I hope to build a crowd-sourced database of 20th and 21st-century simian animal actors, while also publishing short synopses of their histories on a blog.
 
Duties: I am seeking a student who has a background in literary studies, biology, or history, who is interested in learning more about critical animal studies, digital humanities, or public history. Skills include: researching in online databases (including 20th-century newspaper collections); synthesizing data into short biographies; copyediting; tagging data; database management; social media management and strategy.
 
Time commitment: 1-3 hours per week (average)
 
Credit hour option*: 1
 
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: hdugan@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.

Professor: Roy Grinker
Department: Anthropology
Title: Reducing the Stigma of Mental Illness and Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Description: Psychiatric conditions remain the leading cause of disability in the U.S., but they are fast becoming more a normal part of humanity than a sign of disgrace. I am writing a book, under contract with Basic Books, to explain why this transition is happening, and how we can sustain it. The book tells the story of how, over the past three hundred years, doctors have invented and re-invented mental illnesses, and how societies then morally judged the people who suffered from them. Actual scientific discoveries have had little effect on the ebb and flow of the stigma of psychiatric conditions; the dynamics of stigma have to be understood through cultural history, in the ideologies of exclusion and inclusion that humans create at particular times and places.
The book begins with the proposition that “mental illness” is a modern, capitalist invention that emerged in late 18th century Europe as a moral judgment that people who were unproductive workers lacked reason and value. Indeed, since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the most stigmatized people have tended to be those who did not to conform to capitalist standards. But as our conceptions of the ideal economy and the ideal worker change, so too does stigma. Throughout the world, economies are also shifting just enough to value the people we now call “neuro-diverse” and who were previously alienated, denigrated, and perhaps institutionalized. The valued 21st century worker might be self-employed, work part-time, combine paid work with family care or volunteerism, interact virtually rather than in person, and even live with his parents into adulthood. He might be socially awkward, have restricted interests in science and technology, and be more comfortable interacting with others online than face-to-face. Such flexibility in our assessment of social and economic worth has made it possible for people with a range of differences to become valued and visible parts of economic and community life to a degree that was impossible in previous eras.
Duties: Duties include: editing, locating sources, both archival and interview; fact checking; analysis of interview tapes and transcripts; attending and analyzing relevant lectures and symposia in the D.C. area (e.g., at NIH and other parts of HHS; U.S. Military; congressional hearings). The student must be interested traveling in the history if mental illness and be willing to travel in the D.C. area to assist in gathering data.
Time commitment: 7-9 hours per week (average)
Credit hour option*: 3
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: rgrink@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met.  Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.

 
Professor: Shoko Hamano
 
Department: EALL
 
Title: Compilation of an annotated bibliography of Korean literature on Korean ideophones/sound-symbolic expressions (의성어 /의태어)
 
Description: The long-term objective of the research of which this project is part of is to find evidence possibly connecting the Korean and Japanese languages. The genealogical connection between these two languages, although suspected, has not been established because the standard method of identifying phonological correspondences between cognates fails in the case of languages that separated more than 5000 years ago. Instead, this project attempts to identify similarities between the ideophonic  (sound-symbolic) systems of these two languages that cannot be accounted for on either universal or typological grounds.
 
One problem in this line of comparative research presents, however, is that forms normally considered ideophones either by linguists or lexicographers may contain pseudo-ideophonic expressions derived from prosaic words. The problem is severe in Korean because of extensive ideophonization of prosaic words. (The same problem exists in Japanese to an extent, but not to the same extent.) In order to be able to compare ideophones in these two languages, unproblematic ideophones need to be identified first. On the basis of insights gleaned from extensive studies of Japanese ideophones, I have already identified mono-syllabic Korean ideophones using a dictionary of Korean ideophones. Disyllabic and trisyllabic forms are more problematic. Existing literature written in English or Japanese does not provide clear guidelines.
 
Serious phonological study of Korean ideophones began in the 1990s in the US, Japan, and Korea. I have access to materials from the former two countries, and these usually focus specifically on vowel harmony and consonantal mutation, but I am more interested in how ideophonic roots are composed, and I suspect that Korean resources would be more varied and contain relevant information. Unfortunately, because I am not a proficient reader of Korean (I can read short phonological papers slowly), I do not know how much work has been done in Korea in this specific area I am interested in.
 
I would therefore like a native speaker of Korean to look for academic articles and books written in Korean on the topic of Korean ideophones and identify the specific sections that are relevant to my research. The research assistant will need to provide full citations with short summaries of the most relevant sections in English. This will allow me to focus on the most relevant literature and to quickly come up with a better picture of Korean ideophones.
 
Duties: In the first week, I will give a briefing of the overall research objective and background, and the procedures that the assistant needs to follow. The assistant will first conduct online search of dissertations, journal articles, book articles, and books on Korean ideophones and translate their titles into English. The assistant will acquire physical or electronic copies of these materials. (If they can be acquired only by a faculty member, I will order them.) Then the assistant will scan the table of contents, identify sections that appear relevant, skim through the sections, and summarize in English what is reported there. If a section seems too technical, the summary can be very brief only noting that there is a technical discussion of the subject. The assistant will need to compile these into bi-weekly reports, providing the full citations, electronic paper versions and/or scanned pages, and summaries. After each report, I will meet with the assistant for half an hour to provide feedback and ask clarification questions if necessary.
 
Time commitment: 1-3 hours per week (average)
 
Credit hour option*: 1
 
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: hamano@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.

Professor: Sarah Binder
 
Department: Political Science
 
Title: Presidents, the Federal Reserve and the Limits of Independence
 
Description: Most observers and students of the American political economy believe that presidents routinely observe a norm of “hands off the Federal Reserve” — refraining from commenting on the Fed’s setting of interest rates or other policy choices. In fact, that tradition is relatively short-lived: It took root during the Clinton presidency and ground to a halt under President Trump. In this research project, I build on my recent co-authored book (with Mark Spindel), “The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve” (Princeton 2017), to probe the roots and evolution of presidents’ interactions with the central bank. Under what economic and political conditions have presidents signaled their views publicly to the Fed and with what consequence for the Fed’s handling of monetary policy?
 
Duties: RA responsibilities will primarily include coding of New York Times articles that mention the Federal Reserve and the president during the period 1935-2018. The articles will be coded to capture all instances of presidents signaling their views to the Fed and vice versa. The RA will work as part of a team of coders, including my full-time RA and part-time fall intern at the Brookings Institution. Depending on how much coding progress we make over the semester, I might have the Honors program RA research write up a few case studies of notable interactions between presidents and Fed chairs. I’ve indicated this as a 1-3 hour/ week time commitment and option for course credit, but I am amenable to longer hours for more credit (or not) or no course credit.  Preference for students with background courses in political science and/or economics.
 
Time commitment: 1-3 hours per week (average)
 
Credit hour option*: 1
 
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: binder@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.