Below are the research assistantships currently available in our department.
Please check back soon as new opportunities are listed on a continuing basis.
You can also apply to labs across a variety of Psychology, Neuroscience, and other STEM fields on the PROPEL website.
If you are a PBS faculty member or graduate student and would like to post on this page, please complete our Undergraduate Recruitment Form.
Research Assistantships
Duties:
As a research assistant with the Rudd Adoption Research Program, you will be helping facilitate our ongoing research projects by conducting literature reviews, organizing and analyzing qualitative/quantitative data, and/or working with community outreach. Current projects center around the life experiences of adult adoptees (e.g., how male adoptees experience fatherhood, adoptive parents’ becoming grandparents, and clinical and psychosocial perspectives of adult adoptees) as well as children and young adults who have lived experience with the child welfare system, (e.g., youth in foster and congregate care, psychological and physical health, as well as educational outcomes, of individuals with lived experience in foster care). In the future, research assistants may help with data collection on new projects as well.
Prerequisites:
Students of any major from any year are invited to apply. Students who have lived or working experience with adoption or foster care, or students who have taken courses in developmental psychology and statistics, are strongly encouraged to apply.
Hours Per Week: 6-9 hours per week
Credits: 2-3 credits
Sponsoring Faculty Member: Dr. Elsbeth Neil
How to Apply: Email our post-baccalaureate fellow, Conor Johnston (@email) with your updated resume and unofficial transcript. Please also include a short message about your research interests and why you are interested in working with the Rudd Adoption Research Program.
The FAM Lab is looking to accept research assistants who can serve as mentors at a local youth mentoring program that serves 7th, 8th, and 9th grade students. Mentors will engage with students through activities like basketball, volleyball, weight training, homework help, or simply chatting. Mentors are expected to form meaningful connections with students throughout the semester and promote positive and safe behaviors. Patience, empathy, and respect are all necessary qualities to be a successful mentor. Additionally, RAs/mentors may support data collection efforts within the program, which aim to capture the program’s positive impacts on its students and areas of improvement.
Duties:
- Commit to attending the youth mentoring program at least twice a week (the program
runs Monday-Thursday; 7:00am-8:45am; participation requires being present the entire
time). Transportation will be provided.
- Attend general lab meetings
- Support data collection efforts
- Attend lab outreach events (if lab hours need to be fulfilled)
Prerequisites: Students with mentorship experience and/or experience working with youth are
encouraged to apply.
Time commitments:
- Attending youth mentoring program at least twice a week (7:00am-8:45am)
- Biweekly general lab meetings
- Biweekly check in meetings with mentorship team
- Some outreach events will take place on weekends
Hours per week: 6-9
Credits: 2/3
Sponsoring Faculty Member: Dr. Evelyn Mercado
How to apply: Fill out the application at this link
Position: General Research Assistant Position
The FAM Lab is looking to accept research assistants for the Fall 2025 semester. Research assistants are expected to contribute to the lab's ongoing projects (i.e. Latinx Biobehavioral Family Study, Parent-Youth Physiology Project, Scoping Literature Review), as well as the lab's community outreach efforts. Working on our projects includes becoming familiar with study protocols, collecting data through family interviews and saliva samples, cleaning physiological data using MindWare software, and critically analyzing research articles.
Contributing to our outreach efforts can include attending health resource fairs, creating and implementing workshops for community organizations, and recruiting participants at community events.
We conduct a lot of our work with Spanish-speaking communities. While it is not a requirement, students who are fluent in Spanish are strongly encouraged to apply.
Prerequisites:
Students of any major are welcome to apply.
Time commitments:
Weekly check in meetings with study team
Monthly general lab meetings
Commitment to keeping two weekends per month available, many outreach events and data collections take place on weekends.
Hours per week: 6-9
Credits: 2/3
Sponsoring Faculty Member: Dr. Evelyn Mercado
How to apply: Fill out the application at this link: https://forms.gle/q4tqnPAD5snJfRPV7
Duties: You will help us test subjects (other students) in experiments testing visual perception and attention. You will help to organize and interpret the results, and to design and implement new experiments. You will attend our lab meetings and contribute to discussions as we design experiments and interpret results.
Times Student Must be Available: You will need to attend our lab meetings on Friday afternoons.
Hours Per Week: Nine hours per week
Credits: Three credits
Sponsoring Faculty Member: Kyle Cave
How to Apply: Email @email with a description of what you hope to do after you graduate. Include a list of courses you have taken that are relevant to Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. These can include courses in related areas such as Computer Science, Philosophy, and Biology.
Undergraduate research assistants will help to develop and run experiments testing cognitive abilities like recognizing faces or making quick decisions under uncertainty. They will attend a weekly lab meeting in which we learn about the research process and discuss articles from the primary literature in graduate-student-coordinated reading groups. The lab focuses on testing mathematical models of cognition with behavioral data. We use quantitative approaches like signal detection theory, the diffusion model, and information theory to make discoveries about topics like eyewitness memory, fingerprint examination, and probabilistic reasoning.
Student qualifications
Flexible, but a background of success in stats or other quantitative courses is valued.
Time commitment
1-4 h/wk 5-7 h/wk
Position Types and Compensation
Research - Independent Study or Research Assistant credit
Research - Volunteer
How to apply
Apply through Propel: https://propel.umass.edu/
This project investigates how exposure to war influences moral values and cooperation, focusing on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While previous research has shown that wars can reshape economic, political, and social landscapes, less is known about how conflict impacts the moral values that guide human behavior. This project aims to fill that gap by combining psychological theory with large-scale data analysis.
Drawing on Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), the study examines whether war exposure leads to systematic shifts in moral values. Using survey data and geospatial indicators of proximity to conflict zones, we will employ instrumental variable methods to identify causal effects of war exposure on moral attitudes.
In parallel, we will analyze large-scale textual data from VKontakte and Telegram, two major online platforms in the Russian-speaking world. By scraping and processing messages from before and after the onset of the invasion, we will track how the moral language used in public discourse evolves over time.
Student RAs will help in exploring past work on Russian and Ukrainian text corpora and natural language processing, culturally adapting the materials used in data collection, and finding suitable sources of text data. Interested students should describe their past research experience, their familiarity with Russian and/or Ukrainian cultures, and their technical knowledge (if any) of text analysis.
Student qualifications
Required:
Fluency in Russian and/or Ukrainian
Familiarity with Russian and/or Ukrainian culture
Recommended:
Background in psychology, political science, sociology, economics, data science, or related fields
Familiarity with data analysis tools (R, Python)
Experience with web scraping, NLP, or corpus linguistics
Time commitment
8-10 h/wk
Position Types and Compensation
Research - Independent Study or Research Assistant credit
How to apply
Apply through Propel: https://propel.umass.edu/
Duties: Undergraduate research assistants will be working with a doctoral student on their dissertation project as part of a coding team. RAs will be trained on a coding system which will be utilized when reviewing videos and transcripts. Coding will focus on preschool children's responses to an emotional displacement task via videos and transcripts. RAs will attend weekly meetings with the coding team and doctoral student.
Times Student Must be Available: Weekly meetings will be determined based on student availability
Hours Per Week: 6 - 9 hours
Credits: 2/3 credits
Sponsoring Faculty Member: Adam Grabell
How to Apply: Email [email protected] with your CV (include current GPA, past research experience/relevant work experience, relevant coursework), and a brief paragraph describing your interest in this position and what you hope to gain from this experience.
Duties: Undergraduate research assistants will assist graduate students in running experiments that investigate number cognition and language. These experiments include an eye-tracking experiment, an EEG experiment, and behavioral experiments. Research assistants can either devote their time to one project/method or explore several projects. In addition to running experiments, research assistants will also be expected to attend lab meetings and contribute to discussions as we design new experiments and interpret results.
Times Student Must be Available: Times are flexible
Hours Per Week: 3-9 hours/week depending on credits requested
Credits: 1-3
Sponsoring Faculty Member: Joonkoo Park
How to Apply: To apply, please fill out and submit this application