Summer Research Opportunities with Columbia Faculty

Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (URF) offers various funding awards to support Columbia students interested in engaging in full-time research over the summer. While students may develop their own independent research projects, URF welcomes the opportunity to connect students with faculty members who are interested in having an undergraduate researcher contribute to a specific research project of their own.

Through this collaboration, undergraduate researchers have the opportunity to engage in research activities in a specific academic discipline allowing them to learn firsthand about what academic research entails. They will also have the opportunity to develop relationships with experts in their field, enriching their undergraduate experience while allowing them to consider academic goals and postgraduate careers.

HOW TO APPLY

Review the list of opportunities below, taking note of any requirements, and then apply for one of the following summer funding awards through URF. Don't see something of interest to you? Check back! URF adds to this list as new opportunities are made available. (Please note the instructions below before starting your application!)

*Please note that these opportunities are only available to students who are currently enrolled undergraduates in good standing at Columbia.

Laidlaw Scholars (CC First-Years or CC transfer students in their first year at Columbia)
CC Summer Research Fellowships (first, second and third year CC students are eligible to apply)
Comer Climate Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowships (first, second and third year CC students, who major or intend to major in a field related to sustainability or climate, are eligible to apply)
GS Summer Research Fellowships (first, second and third year GS students are eligible to apply)

IMPORTANT NOTES:

All research opportunities are full-time, in person, on campus, and are six weeks in duration, coinciding with Summer Session A (unless otherwise indicated). Participation in a faculty research project is not compatible with taking courses, working at another job, or volunteering;
In your application, please list the title of the project you are seeking to contribute to; explain why you are interested in this project, and describe any past experience you believe relevant to your candidacy. In an effort save faculty inboxes, please do not reach out to faculty directly. We will share your applications with the faculty member connected to the project of interest, and we will be in touch with you regarding the status of your application;
Students may only apply to ONE faculty project, and students must apply through URF. Please do not attempt to contact the faculty member directly; if you have questions, e-mail ugrad-urf@columbia.edu.

SUMMER 2026 FACULTY RESEARCH PROJECTS

Anti-mafia investigative journalists in Sicily

Department: Anthropology
Description: This project involves indexing and digitalizing the entire legal case from a murder of an investigative journalist in 1988. The trial took place in 2011-2014. The entire case and relevant others have been scanned.
Primary Duties: The student researcher will collect jpeg images in pdf files and index them in Zotero, connecting them to other multimedia files collected over the years. In addition to examining and indexing files, the undergraduate researcher will conduct research into online newspapers and media sites that have discussed the life, and death, of this investigative journalist, and the questions that were raised at the trial.
Requirements: Intermediate Italian reading and writing skills; some familiarity with spreadsheets, image-pdf conversion, and the online bibliographic platform Zotero
Time commitment: 30 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks.

Portugal's Start-up Ecosystem

Department: Anthropology
Description: Over the last decade, Lisbon has been witnessing the emergence of a young startup ecosystem. In collaboration with the government and the community, Lisbon aspires to become one of the most competitive, innovative and creative cities in Europe as notable foreign companies are settling up offices in Portugal’s capital. This newly launched financial ecosystem is affecting the entire urban and coastal landscape, including relation with the sea, in aesthetic, political and economic terms. The student would be involved in researching in detail some of these emerging start-ups, their online and offline dynamics with the city, within Portugal’s Start-up Ecosystem, particularly in light of the recent promotion of Lisbon into a “Capital of Innovation” by the European Commission.
Primary Duties: The student would be responsible to collect and develop a startup ecosystem survey and overview profile not only in terms of the specific scale-up levels (the world of Portuguese “minicorns” and “unicorns”) but also in its relation to the larger context of Portugal as an emerging tech hub. If conditions permit it, in addition to online research the student would join me in the field during month June.
Requirements: Basic knowledge/understanding of ethnographic methods as well as Portuguese is required.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Searching for Counterparts of Gravitational Wave Sources

Department: Astronomy
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: We will be looking for a characteristic X-ray "echo" produced by X-rays emitted at the time of the merger of two black holes (giving rise to a burst of gravitational waves) scattering off the dust in our own Galactic interstellar medium. Such an echo will pinpoint the precise position of the source, an issue of fundamental importance in astrophysics and cosmology; the gravitational wave data alone cannot tell us. There are now over fifty black hole-black hole gravitational wave events to examine.
Primary Duties: All X-ray and gravitational wave data we require are in the public domain, easily accessible to anyone with a laptop. We will identify and assemble the data to be searcged, Simple software to visualize and manipulate data is available for download. We may need some simple customized calculations on the images we inspect, so a bit of (very) basic programming experience is necessary (having written simple code in, for instance, Python or something similar). We will publish the results of the search collectively, with the group of undergrads who have worked and are working on this problem.
Requirements: Simple programming skills in Python or comparable language
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Can in-situ measurements and models inform the coupling between forest carbon and water dynamics?

Department: Biology and Paleo Environment
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: Forest productivity, health, and resilience are highly influenced by terrestrial carbon and water cycles. The degree of connection between these two cycles in Northeast forests remains uncertain, and clearer evidence is needed to support effective management decisions. The Lamont Sanctuary Forest (LSF) experimental site on Columbia’s Lamont campus now includes a one-hectare plot that supports student participation in research and education. Baseline measurements and modeling of soil moisture, soil health, and forest and soil carbon stocks since 2024 provide an initial record of the factors that control carbon and water dynamics at the site. In this project, we propose leveraging two novel and automated in-situ monitoring systems that quantify soil water retention and carbon fluxes. This expansion of campus-based monitoring will allow a more complete assessment of changes in water and carbon processes and the extent to which these processes respond together. The resulting information will clarify key mechanistic links within the forest system and will guide the development of future management strategies that support the improvement of multiple ecosystem services. Furthermore, this project will pair in-situ measurements with satellite and drone imagery and will use GIS-based environmental data layers to support a data-driven and AI-assisted analysis of water and carbon dynamics through space and time. The work will mark an early step toward a fully established long-term experimental site on campus. The site will also strengthen student participation and will advance education and research related to forest carbon dynamics, water regulation, and ecosystem processes.
Primary Duties: This project will use both grid-based and model-based monitoring at the LSF experimental site. The student will gain hands-on experience with sample collection and with operation of a HyProp-based laboratory system that produces soil moisture release curves, as well as operation of an automated carbon flux measurement system. The student will also build skills in sensor data processing, model-based spatiotemporal data analysis, and collaboration with Lamont scientists involved in related research. Field and laboratory tasks will average 10 hours per week. The remaining time will focus on data processing, literature synthesis, image analysis, model calibration and validation, and preparation of manuscript and reports.
Requirements: A strong interest in addressing environmental challenges through field, lab, and model-based research is required. General chemistry and laboratory courses or prior experience handling soil samples would be a plus.
Time commitment: 40 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Visual Problem Solving in Chemistry Learning

Department: Chemistry
Description: Chemistry learning materials are filled with a variety of visual information (chemical symbols, mathematical representations, graphical information and text) that students must understand and process in order to solve problems. Knowing where and how to look at this visual information is critical to forming new ideas, recalling required knowledge, and performing the steps necessary for problem solving. A key problem-solving step is effectively identifying the chemically relevant information from the material presented. This project will use investigate chemistry problem solving a problem by tracking viewing with an eye-tracking system.
Primary Duties: Research in our lab begins with human subject training, an orientation to eye-tracking research, and the mixed methods analysis techniques used to investigate visual problem solving in chemistry. Depending on your interests you may also work with volunteers to collect data.
Requirements: The ideal candidate will have taken general chemistry.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Analysis of high-speed internet deployment

Department: Computer Science
Description: The federal government has been trying for the past decade to bring high-speed internet access ("broadband") to even the most rural locations. The project analyzes how effective this has been and whether satellite service such as StarLink can provide an alternative.
Primary Duties: Analyze very large data sets, using geospatial, statistical, or machine learning techniques. Formulate and test hypotheses. Integrate data sources such as census data.
Requirements: Statistics; Python (e.g., Jupyter Notebook); SQL helpful.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Melting ice, ocean circulation, and abrupt climate change in the past

Department: Earth and Environmental Sciences
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: The last ice age was punctuated by repeated abrupt climate changes that involved dramatic cooling of the northern hemisphere at times when much of southern hemisphere was warming. These climate shifts occurred at times of episodes of catastrophic iceberg discharge from the vast Laurentide ice sheet that covered much of North America, and the melting icebergs may have reduced northward heat transport by weakening the large-scale Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). Although computer simulations consistently suggest it is possible, and this mechanism is widely favored as a potential explanation for these otherwise puzzling climate oscillations, some studies have argued that the bipolar temperature changes actually happened first, thus causing iceberg outbursts into the glacial ocean. A study site that is positioned near the boundary of the subtropical gyre and the subpolar North Atlantic holds great promise to contribute to resolving this puzzle. Paired measurements of two proxies for deep ocean circulation will be compared to proxy evidence for sea-surface temperature change and ice-drift in the central Atlantic. The selected student will have the opportunity to generate a paleoclimate record for the last ice age that can be combined with existing evidence to complete a record of variations in regional oceanographic climate conditions that can be directly compared to deep ocean proxies in the same sediment core. This in turn may help determine whether icebergs and melting ice initiated the climate changes, or were instead released subsequently as glaciers grew in response to the abrupt northern cooling. What is needed is a sequence of evidence in the same sediments that can unequivocally clarify the roles of icebergs, glacial meltwater, ocean circulation and sea-surface temperature (SST) change. Simultaneous investigation of proxies for all of these processes in sediments from the selected study site may provide such insights.
Primary Duties: The student will work in our shared sediment and microscopy laboratories in the New Core Lab at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO). Free hourly transportation is provided between Morningside and LDEO. This project will require a student to process samples taken from sediment cores, identify and quantify ice-rafted debris, determine the relative abundance of polar foraminifera species, and possibly select and prepare specimens for isotopic analysis. They will then apply visual and simple time-series analyses to assess the sequence of climate events. Training will be provided for all procedures.
Requirements: None, although knowledge of basic oceanography and climate are helpful.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

How did past ice age cycles affect the climate in the Pacific Ocean?

Department: Earth and Environmental Sciences
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: The Earth has experienced repeated and extended episodes of global glaciation over the last two million years. These past climate changes increased in magnitude during the past million years, with sea level variations of more than 120 meters, and large changes in regional temperature, in association with increases and decreases concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Although the climate variations are documented very well in ice cores from Antarctica and in sediment cores from the Atlantic Ocean, there is less detailed information available about oceanographic and climate changes in the Pacific Ocean throughout these glacial cycles. Seagoing sediment coring and ocean drilling has recovered long sequences of deep-sea sediments from a range of locations that hold the promise for insights into the Pacific response to global climate change, including variations in the tropical El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, and biological productivity and deep-ocean carbon storage in the North Pacific. This project is designed to allow a student to contribute to the body of knowledge that can help answer the question of how the Pacific Ocean varied through ice age climate cycles. It will involve hands-on investigation of deep-sea sediments and sedimentary constituents including microfossils from one or more Pacific Ocean sites.
Primary Duties: The student will work in our shared sediment and microscopy laboratories in the New Core Lab at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO). Free hourly transportation is provided between Morningside and LDEO. This project will require a student to process samples from the sediment core, identify sedimentary components using a binocular microscope, select and prepare microfossil foraminifera specimens for isotopic analysis. Training and guidance will be provided for all procedures, which will use existing equipment including freeze-dryer, ovens, microbalance, sieves, beakers and microscope.
Requirements: None, although knowledge of basic oceanography and climate are helpful.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Trees

Department: English and Comparative Literature
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: This project, which corresponds with two classes taught at Columbia (one graduate and one undergraduate core seminar) on "Trees" is part of a work-in-progress to connect narratives and histories about trees with the history of deforestation, literature and environment, colonization, and conversion. This is a wide ranging project in terms of time period, geographic interest, and methodology and provides a different means for conceptualizing climate crises by means a longer historical context. The applicant should have an ability - or an eagerness- to navigate diverse fields, periods, and terminology. Languages a plus. Interest in literature and eco-criticism is necessary. Approaches from literature, art history, philosophy, history, religion, archaeology, all helpful, while also interested in earth sciences, economics, anthropology also helpful.
Primary Duties: Pursue independent research on the topic in particular areas of interest, in coordination; Assist in organizing research materials (create a library of pdf's, recordings, films, etc) according to geographic location and period - be able to develop a system to cross reference; find new data/relevant publications; correspond with other scholars and organizations. Ability to work with RBML a plus, but not absolutely necessary.
Requirements: Good organizational capacities and familiarity with literary research required. Ability to work in diverse languages a plus. Literary backgrounds with interest in eco-critical studies an asset. Web building skills a plus in terms of creating a new archive and possibly a mapping database.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

A Theory of Literary Character

Department: English and Comparative Literature
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: I am collaborating with several scholars in English and in Computer Science on a project about literary character. We are developing a way to quantify the relative presence of characters in novels in order to answer questions about: 1) the differences between major and minor characters; 2) social networks within novels; 3) changes in characterization techniques across narration (first- versus third-person), genre, individual author careers, and historical periods. To date, we have completed some gold-standard human tagging of individual novels published in English between 1800 and 1900 and identified prompts that enable AI to closely replicate the human reading. We have also developed an initial corpus of ~400 novels published in English between 1800 and 1900 that can be used to scale up the argument. Questions we are posing include: what exactly is the difference between major and minor characters, and does that binary accurately capture the character system of realist novels? Are female authors more likely to have female protagonists, or a larger number of female characters, than male authors? Do certain genres have larger or smaller casts of characters? Do certain aspects of characterization (such as the representation of consciousness) become more prominent as characters do?
Primary Duties: 1) identify and obtain books and articles that discuss literary character; 2) work on some of the more technical aspects of the project, including machine reading, data visualization, and establishing the digital corpus (drawing primarily on works available within Project Gutenberg); 3) help with tasks related to publishing this research, such as assembling bibliographies and formatting citations; 4) attend team meetings where Professor Marcus and her collaborators discuss the project and the larger issues involved in the analysis (in narrative theory, digital humanities, and natural language processing).
Requirements: Training will be provided for the machine learning and data visualization aspects of the projects. You will need to already have, or be willing to acquire within the first two weeks, 1) enthusiasm for learning new skills; 2) familiarity with databases Google Scholar, JSTOR, and ProQuest; 3) expertise and ease with Excel; 4) willingness to work with AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT to track down sources and analyze texts; 5) ability to glean information from Project Gutenberg and transfer it into an Excel spreadsheet (finding IDs for individual works uploaded to Gutenberg as parts of a collection, or spread across multiple volumes); 6) Knowledge of other languages is relevant (but not required) in the event that we expand the corpus beyond Anglophone texts.
Time commitment: 40 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Dark Prelude: Black Life Before Mourning

Department: English and Comparative Literature
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: This project is an experimental recovery of Black life in the wake of spectacular state and vigilante violence. Traffic stops and other chance encounters are prefaced by the music that the subjects (such as Sandra Bland and Daunte Wright) enjoyed before their fateful ends. As creative nonfiction, the book will attend to the musical choices made and joys experienced by Black women and men on the brink in order to reveal conditions of power and their refusal.
Primary Duties: Internet searches (newspapers, social media, blogs, protest organizations) for obituaries, commentary, opinion pieces, family announcements, hashtags, dirges; listening to/for music referencing the deceased; preliminary archival searches and requests for car and stereo manuals, police reports, trial transcripts; collecting and organizing music industry information from music charts, radio play, etc; secondary source curation and annotated bibliographies.
Requirements: Interest in Black/Ethnic Studies and music; previous research experience; knowledge of contemporary social movements and the ability to read music a plus.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Columbia's Forgotten Seth Low Junior College (1928-1934)

Department: History
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: In 1928, Columbia University decided to set up a satellite campus in Brooklyn for the growing number of students applying to its campus. Columbia's Board of Trustees called this satellite campus Seth Low Junior College. While it had the same tuition and requirements as Columbia College, the student body, as quickly became evident, was overwhelmingly filled with young men from Jewish immigrant families. This school was part of Columbia's strategy to deal with the growing number of Jewish students seeking admission. The RA will research in Columbia's archives on Morningside Heights and in the Medical campus, as well as archives throughout New York City. This project speaks to the collision of Jewish history, New York City history, and the history of American higher education.
Primary Duties: Research into primary and secondary source materials at both the 116th and 165th street campuses, as well as other archives throughout New York City. Summarize secondary sources as well and build a bibliography with Zotero
Requirements: Interest in historical and archival research; understanding of how to read and summarize historiography; basic skills in Zotero preferred but not required.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Global Health History focused on South Asia: The politics of immunity, chronicity and risk in post colonial India

Department: Sociomedical Sciences and History
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: Focus is on a modern history of how public health, social science, demographic and psych disciplines in post colonial India have evolved and defined and understood immune and compromised bodies and chronic disease outside of the laboratory, and debates around health and citizenship (1940-90's).
Primary Duties: Searches in online archives, ordering and working with secondary and primary sources, identifying key parts of these texts, and helping to synthesize and frame these different strands of ideas in debates in global agencies (UN/WHO/Rockefeller) and in India. Conducting a oral history interviews is a possibility; in addition, the student researcher will work with collected archival documents, classifying them and making annotated bibliographies.
Requirements: Training in history and/or anthropology in course work, and exposure to biological sciences/psychology is welcome; interest in archives and primary sources analysis is also a plus. Skills in organizing references and readings to be able to access quotes, citations and sources (Zotero or other) is also welcome.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Children's Rights and the Arms Industry: the Impact of Weapons in Conflict Affected and High Risk Areas

Department: Human Rights
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: This research project is complex due to the opacity of the arms industry and the inherent difficulty in directly attributing impact on the ground to a specific manufacturer. The data that the student will need to gather falls into two main categories: verified on-the-ground impact data and arms trade/production data. On-the-Ground Impact Data: This data establishes the type and scale of harm caused by explosive weapons. Key sources include: UN Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism (MRM) on Children and Armed Conflict: The UN Secretary-General's annual report on Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) verifies the six grave violations against children, including killing and maiming. This data often attributes casualties to specific types of weapons (e.g., airstrikes, shelling, IEDs) and, occasionally, the party responsible.
NGO/Civil Society Reports: Save the Children, and the International Network on Explosive Weapons (INEW) collect and analyze casualty data, often focusing specifically on the use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas (EWIPA) and their reverberating effects (damage to schools, hospitals, etc.). Medical and Psychological Studies: Data from humanitarian medical groups (e.g., those treating blast injuries in conflict zones) can detail the specific physical and psychological harm profiles of children resulting from explosive weapons. Arms Industry Data: This data identifies the manufacturers and the weapons they produce.

Top 30 Arms Companies: Use publicly available defense industry rankings (e.g., from SIPRI or Defense News Top 100) to compile the list of the world's largest defense companies. Company Product Portfolios: For each of the top 30, compile a list of their major products that are considered explosive weapons or key components of such systems. Arms Trade and Export Data: Sources like the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database can show which countries are the top exporters and recipients of major weapons systems.

Direct Attribution: Weapon Identification: In some documented incidents, experts on the ground or in investigative reports (e.g., from UN commissions or Human Rights Watch) may be able to identify the specific weapon remnant or system used, thereby linking it to the manufacturer. This is most common for larger systems like missiles or specific aircraft models. Confirmed Sales/Transfers: Cross-reference the identified weapon type with publicly known export licenses or sales contracts from the Top 30 companies to the belligerent state/actor. Supply Chain Analysis: Since a single weapon is composed of parts from many companies, tracing components is critical. System-Level Tracing: Focus on major systems (e.g., a fighter jet or a missile launcher) and research the key subsystems or components (engines, guidance systems, sensors, bomb casings) that may be produced by other companies within the Top 30. Ammunition & Consumables: Trace the manufacturers of the munitions that are frequently implicated in civilian harm.

Thematic and Jurisdictional Inference. If direct attribution isn't possible: Geographic Correlation: If a company is the sole or dominant supplier of a weapon system type (e.g., a specific artillery piece) to a government that is consistently responsible for killing and maiming children with artillery. Weapon Type Risk: Certain products such as large-area-effect explosive weapons suitable for use in populated areas pose a higher inherent human rights risk and should be flagged regardless of specific confirmed use. Investor Information: The final goal of this project is to translate this complex data into actionable information for investors concerning Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) and Risk. Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) Failure: Highlight where the company's products are linked to harm, suggesting a failure in their HRDD processes to prevent or mitigate adverse impacts in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs).
Primary Duties: Student will be responsible for collecting and analyzing data for various countries: Yemen, Ukraine, Sudan.
Requirements: Attention to detail.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Social Media Memes, Immigration, and Human Rights

Department: Human Rights
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: This project examines how immigration and deportation are framed through social media memes and visual narratives, and what those framings mean for contemporary human rights debates. Rather than focusing on legal texts or policy statements, the project analyzes images, short-form posts, and meme-style content that circulate widely on platforms such as Twitter/X and shape public understandings of who belongs, who is excluded, and whose rights are seen as legitimate. The research compares two cases of nativist visual communication. The first is Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), an extreme-right party that has relied heavily on social media memes and visual provocation to promote exclusionary narratives around national identity and "remigration." The second draws on an existing archive of approximately 150 immigration-related posts collected from U.S. government Twitter/X accounts associated with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. These posts—ranging from patriotic imagery to ironic or provocative enforcement memes—represent an unusual and largely unprecedented case: federal agencies acting as political entrepreneurs for nativism in ways typically associated with insurgent parties rather than incumbent state institutions. Here, the state itself adopts the visual grammar and affective strategies of the populist right. The project approaches memes as human rights-relevant artifacts: not trivial jokes, but visual frames that can normalize harm, legitimize exclusion, or render deportation emotionally distant.
Primary Duties: Organize and code meme content; identify recurring visual and narrative patterns; assist in comparative analysis across the German and U.S. cases; maintain a shared dataset; contribute to short analytical memos.
Requirements: Interest in human rights, social media, digital culture, or visual analysis. Prior coursework in human rights or media studies is strongly preferred. Knowledge of German is helpful but not required.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Climate Change & Environmental Law Project

Department: Columbia Law School
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: The Sabin Center is seeking 1 to 2 undergraduate researchers to work on a range of cutting-edge climate change, energy, and environmental policy issues.
Primary Duties: Projects may include research and writing on federal government attempts to undermine climate science, the roll-back of federal climate-related regulations, the cancellation of federal grants for climate mitigation and adaptation efforts, and other topics. Researchers will receive broad exposure to the field of climate law, both domestically in the US and internationally.
Requirements: Interest in the field. Students with some background in environmental policy, energy policy, and/or sustainable development are particularly encouraged to apply.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

The Future of Bioethics

Department: Medical Humanities and Ethics
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: This project offers a rare opportunity to work on a national study examining how recent federal policy shifts are reshaping the field of bioethics at a moment of profound change. As ethical oversight bodies are dismantled, funding streams disrupted, and institutional support weakened, the field faces a moral and structural crisis. Our team is conducting the first systematic investigation of how these disruptions affect research, teaching, governance, and public trust in science, and how professionals are adapting and innovating in response. Students will join a multidisciplinary research group led by scholars in medical anthropology, sociology, and law to help map the changing bioethics landscape, examine the consequences of federal disinvestment, and contribute to developing new, evidence-based models to sustain ethical guidance in biomedicine. This work sits at the intersection of ethics, policy, and social science and offers the chance to be part of research that directly informs national conversations about the future of responsible science.
Primary Duties: Undergraduate researchers will work closely with the study team and receive training in qualitative research methods commonly used in bioethics and the social sciences. Students will assist with identifying and organizing documents related to recent federal actions affecting bioethics programs, help maintain databases of news reports and policy announcements, and support the preparation and distribution of national surveys. They will also help manage interview logistics, such as tracking recruitment, scheduling participants, preparing materials, and organizing transcripts, while gaining exposure to how interviews are conducted and analyzed. Additional tasks may include preparing summaries of publicly available information, contributing to literature scans, and helping with workshop planning and coordination. This position is especially suited for students who want to learn how empirical research in bioethics is conducted and who are curious about the ethics and governance of emerging technologies, health policy, or science and society.
Requirements: Applicants should demonstrate an interest in bioethics, public policy, or the social and ethical dimensions of science and technology. No prior research experience is required, but students must have excellent organizational skills, attention to detail, and the ability to manage tasks reliably and independently. Strong written and verbal communication skills are essential, as is comfort working with online platforms for document organization and data management. Coursework or familiarity with qualitative social science methods, health policy, or related fields is helpful but not required.
Time commitment: 40 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Pathways to Negotiating Genomics Research Partnerships

Department: Medical Humanities and Ethics
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: “Pathways to Negotiating Genomics Research Partnerships” is an NIH-funded study conducted by a multi-institutional team of faculty and graduate researchers from Columbia University, UCSF, the George Washington University, and partner institutions. As part of the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) research program, this project examines how institutions engaged in global genomics research create, sustain, and negotiate partnerships with the communities and groups involved in or affected by their work. Instead of framing challenges in terms of whether people “trust” research, the study focuses on how institutional policies, infrastructure, and decision-making practices shape the possibilities for meaningful and mutually beneficial collaboration. Students will contribute to research exploring how stakeholders, such as researchers, participants, funders, legal teams, and regulatory staff, navigate issues including data ownership, privacy, benefit-sharing, and authority in the research process. A key goal of the project is to develop a practical “negotiation playbook” that helps genomics research teams identify the points in the research lifecycle where partnership-building is most critical. This is an excellent opportunity for students interested in bioethics, global health, policy, and qualitative methods to be part of a research team working at the forefront of ELSI scholarship.
Primary Duties: Undergraduate students will be welcomed as part of a collaborative, multi-institutional research team and will support several components of this qualitative and policy-focused project. Students will assist with identifying, organizing, and summarizing documents related to laws, regulations, and institutional policies that shape genomics research partnerships. They will help maintain shared databases used by the research team, compile publicly available materials, and support the preparation of fieldsite observation materials and interview logistics. Students may assist graduate students and faculty with note-taking during team meetings, gathering background materials on stakeholder groups, and preparing resources for stakeholder engagement activities. They will have the opportunity to attend team meetings across institutions, observe the research process, and learn how faculty and graduate students conduct multi-stakeholder qualitative research in real time. No prior experience is necessary.
Requirements: Applicants should have a strong interest in bioethics, genomics, public policy, or the social and ethical dimensions of science. The position is suitable for students new to research, but applicants must be detail-oriented, organized, and comfortable working as part of a collaborative team spread across multiple institutions. Strong communication skills and reliability in completing tasks are essential. Familiarity with qualitative or social science research, law and policy, or related coursework is helpful but not required.
Time commitment: 40 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks

Midwifery and the Birth of the Modern Middle East

Department: MESAAS
Description: This project examines the history of childbirth and midwifery in the Middle East between 1870 and 1950, focusing on Arabic, Armenian, and Turkish sources. The project explores how reproduction, maternal care, and women’s labor and delivery were framed. This study engages human rights questions on two interconnected fronts. First, the project examines how states, medical institutions, and social actors sought to regulate women’s bodies and reproductive choices—highlighting enduring questions about bodily autonomy, access to healthcare, and the intersection of gender and state power. Second, it situates midwifery in the context of mass violence and displacement: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the massacres and destruction of communities, the emergence of the modern Middle East, and the rebuilding of lives in exile. In these crucibles, midwives and nurses became critical actors in sustaining communities, providing care, and enabling survival.
Primary Duties: Assist in reviewing and annotating documents (midwifery registers, medical treatises, health regulations, and newspaper coverage); Transcribe handwritten and printed materials in Arabic, Armenian, or Turkish into searchable text for inclusion in the project corpus; Help prepare datasets that will be used in an AI-assisted analysis of discourse on midwifery and reproduction.
Requirements: Fluency in reading one of the following languages: Arabic, Armenian, or Turkish.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks.

Partisan Polarization and "Culture War" Issues

Department: Political Science
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: Over the last generation partisan polarization on “culture war” issues has become a defining feature of American politics, with the Democratic Party embracing social liberalism and the Republican Party embracing social conservatism. This was not always the case; for much of the 20th century, social issues such as abortion rights and LGBT rights played virtually no role in politics. Today, of course, they are central to partisan conflict. This transformation, despite its importance, is not well understood. In fact, there is little consensus among political scientists as to its timing, sequence, or causes. Using a variety of data sources, particularly a newly compiled set of historic state-party platforms, we aim to answer a number of crucial questions: Where and when did the partisan divide begin on abortion and gay and lesbian rights? Which party ``moved first"? Was there a critical moment, or was position change incremental? Do abortion and gay rights follow the same pattern? While it is possible that the rise of social issues took place entirely on the national stage, then later spread to state and local politics, we set out to explore the possibility that these debates took place first at the state level.
Primary Duties: A student researcher would assist with data collection and analysis. The data we will be collecting this summer include state legislative roll call votes on relevant bills, local media cover of abortion and LGBT rights, and debates within the political parties about position taking on these issues. We will focus on four case study states---California, Texas, Minnesota, and Massachusetts---during the 1970s and late 1960s.
Requirements: No specialized skills are necessary.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks.

Interactions between Attention, Perception, and Imagination

Department: Psychology
Status: Accepting Applications
Description: The Living Lab is looking for a Research Assistant who will work on a project investigating the interaction between Attention, Perception, and Imagination. The project encompasses three tasks, and the RA will mainly be assisting with conducting the studies and helping coordinate the work of other lab members. Current Research Assistants will be providing training for the tasks.
Primary Duties: Attend weekly lab meetings; Maintain the lab IRBs up to date; help coordinate lab activities and scheduling of participants; maintain the Sona system page; run experimental sessions; miscellaneous tasks upon request. Researcher is also welcome to develop their own study (to be decided with the PI).
Requirements: Background in Psychology, Neuroscience, or computer science / coding; One year or more experience in a research lab; Interest in committing to longer-term work in the lab; Previous knowledge of neuroscience is highly preferred; Excellent attention to detail, high level of self-motivation, and strong interpersonal and organizational skills.
Time commitment: 35 hours minimum / week, 6 weeks