APA Summer Undergraduate Psychology Research Experience (SUPRE)
Program Overview
The Northern Arizona University’s Department of Psychological Sciences will be offering an APA Summer Undergraduate Psychology Research Experience (SUPRE). This paid 8-week program provides talented undergraduates who have little or no prior laboratory experience with the opportunity to gain first-hand knowledge of how scientific research is conducted.
Details:
Dates: June 10 to Aug 5, 2019
Location: NAU Flagstaff Campus
Applications Due: March 25th, 2019
Pay: $12.00 hour x 40 hours per week ($3840+ fringe benefits)
To apply:
Complete application: The application period for the summer 2019 program has ended.
Application includes:
- General Information
- A Personal Statement that answers the following questions:
- Question 1: Describe your interests in psychological research.
- Question 2: Why are you applying for this internship opportunity?
- Question 3: What are your career objectives and how does this research experience relate to those objectives?
- Question 4: In which lab(s) would you prefer to work (rank order)?
- Unofficial Transcripts
- Curriculum Vita (CV) or Resume
Research and Academic Activities:
Each student-researcher will work in a faculty member’s lab (see description of research labs below). Roles in the lab will vary and depend on the needs of the faculty mentor’s research project(s) for Summer 2019. To give student-researchers a broad foundation in entry-level skills for conducting research within the psychological sciences, job responsibilities and training will include both research- and academically-focused activities. For example, student-researchers may attend courses in library training, Institutional Review Board (IRB), statistical techniques, and/or specific methodologies given by one of the faculty mentors with expertise in that area. There will also be biweekly research meetings in which all the students and faculty mentors have an opportunity to share and to learn about specific research topics. Finally, there will also be opportunities for students to interact with other students, a graduate student mentor, and research faculty within the APA SUPRE project. Faculty will develop “cross-over” opportunities in which members of one faculty’s research team will work with another faculty member to be exposed to different research areas, methodologies, and collaborative interpersonal communication skills.
Group-based Sociocultural Activities:
We will also provide the student-researchers with several sociocultural experiences over the 8-week period. For example, we will sponsor a team building experience at the NAU ropes course early in the training to build rapport among the research teams. We will also visit various historical/educational sites in Northern Arizona. These experiences not only will expose students to the sociocultural research opportunities available to them within diverse cultures and will help build team spirit, but also will show them how fun, healthy, and fascinating research and the lifestyle of researchers can be!
The program does not fund for travel, housing or dining.
Description of Research Labs
Dr. Dmitrieva’s Lab. Dr. Dmitrieva’s primary research is on reducing rates of conversion from prediabetes to type 2 diabetes among American Indian patients. She is leading an interdisciplinary team in elucidating stress-related precursors of health behaviors among American Indians with prediabetes. This work leverages advances in smartphone technology and large-scale informatics to develop a culturally-sensitive electronic support system for American Indian patients at risk of type 2 diabetes. This work will also improve the scientific understanding of culturally-relevant mechanisms of key health behaviors implicated in type 2 diabetes onset (i.e., nutrition, physical activity). This project is currently supported through two internal NAU grants, with an external proposal under review.
Dr. Noll’s Lab. Dr. Noll’s research aims to improve stress-related mental health outcomes in families facing adversity. Specifically, her lab uses translational neuroscience to develop novel, scalable, and cost-effective interventions for families with infants and young children who are at high-risk for child maltreatment. This work combines multimodal assessment paradigms (e.g., neuroimaging, micro-social behavioral coding) with clinical observation in naturalistic settings (e.g., through in-home video coaching) to select and refine promising intervention targets that may be most sensitive to change.
Dr. Stevens’ Lab. Dr. Larry Stevens will be investigating the neurology of a temporally- and spatially-defined pathway for the expression and modulation of Compassion in the human brain. His lab will examine experiences of suffering specific to the Native culture that not only might elicit greater compassion on the part of Native American participants, but also would show greater neurological activation in EEG frequency bands, in comparison with both non-Native compassion experiences and participants. This research will thus investigate cultural meaningfulness as a moderator of both behavioral and neurological manifestations of Compassion.
Dr. Dunbar’s Lab. Dr. Dunbar’s lab will be working on two projects. The first project involves description of five latent classes representing adopted adolescents’ pathways into emerging adulthood. The student will read/score interview transcripts, construct descriptions that characterize adolescents within each latent class, and compare characteristics that define the classes. The second project investigates the intersection of gender and racial bias on the determination of feminine, masculine, and gender-neutral career likelihood. The student will collect a sample of professional photographs from faculty pages of non-White appearing scientists in STEM departments at US universities, and program a survey in Qualtrics using these stimuli.