AURCA Students

Thank you for your interest in joining the AURCA program as a student research assistant! AURCA was established within the College of Arts and Sciences to expand access to valuable research and creative opportunities to work-study eligible undergraduates. AURCA provides students the opportunity to expand the learning experience beyond the classroom through mentored research with CAS faculty from a variety of disciplines.

Overview

AURCA connects eligible undergraduates to paid research opportunities with outstanding CAS faculty. AURCA research assistants receive thoughtful mentorship as they expand research progress and cultivate new knowledge for our changing world. AURCA is a space for ALL students to explore their curiosity and develop essential skills that will support academic and professional success. Entering our fifth year, the CAS AURCA program will support a cohort of up to 30 OSU student researchers during the 2025-2026 academic year.

AURCA Details

• Program Goals

  Offer mentored research experiences in a variety of subject areas to OSU undergraduates.

  Provide opportunities for students with little or no research experience to engage in research and creative activity.

  Partner students with a faculty research mentor.

  Help students develop critical thinking skills.

  Help students develop communication skills and meet diverse research teams.

  Help students explore career and educational opportunities.

  Help students expand their learning beyond the classroom by setting and meeting high expectations for themselves.

• Program Application

  The AURCA student application opens during the early summer and applications are typically due near the start of the fall semester. The priority application deadline for 2026-2027 is Friday, August 7, 2026. Positions remain open until filled, so applications are welcome after this early deadline.

  AURCA research positions are limited in number, so students are encouraged to apply early.

• Program Requirements

  AURCA student research assistants will work on research projects for 8 - 12hours per week throughout the full academic year (August through early May).

  AURCA student research assistants will engage with a cohort of fellow researchers through community-building training meetings and events throughout the year. There are three AURCA cohort meetings per semester.

  Set a goal of presenting the AURCA research progress (even if it's still in development) at the annual OSU Research Symposium in April.

  Meet with AURCA staff for a check-in appointment once per year.

  Due to limited project availability, prospective students may be placed on the AURCA waitlist at the beginning of the year. Any accepted AURCA student who does not adhere to the above program requirements may be dismissed from the program so their researcher position may be given to a student willing to follow the requirements.

• Program Eligibility

  Undergraduates attending OSU may apply for the AURCA program. The program is housed under the OSU College of Arts and Sciences. Students whose majors are in other colleges may still apply and be considered for the program.

  Due to the current nature of our program funding, only undergraduates with federal work-study funding as part of their financial aid package are eligible to be AURCA research students.

  Eligible AURCA students must be enrolled full time in both the fall and spring semesters. For purposes of access to work-study funding, full-time enrollment means at least 12 credit hours in each semester (fall and spring).

• AURCA Compensation

  To be eligible for the AURCA program, students must have been offered, and accepted, federal work-study funding as part of their financial aid.

  AURCA students who have matched to a project and been established as AURCA research assistants will receive hourly compensation of $13.00 per hour for the time spent working on the AURCA research project throughout the academic year (fall and spring semesters).

  Federal work-study funding is a program for students with financial need. This program allows undergraduates to receive financial support to help pay for education expenses. Under the AURCA program, part of a student's compensation comes from work-study funds and the remainder is provided by the College of Arts and Sciences to the AURCA program.

Sample Projects

The AURCA program is committed to supporting curious students from all disciplines and backgrounds. We aim to offer a variety of projects from across CAS disciplines. We encourage students to explore broadly and be open to all projects that spark their curiosity. Below are some recent sample AURCA projects, though many projects could be considered interdisciplinary.

• Arts and Humanities

  Digital Publishing in Art History

  We seek a student research assistant to aid with the publication of an open access online scholarly journal that is supported by OSU and another university. The journal, called Different Visions, is focused on art history and medieval studies: https://differentvisions.org/ The student will contribute to the preparation of each issue. The full process can take a year or two from the concept for an issue to the formatting the final essays. During the 22-23 academic year we expect at least two issues to be published, possibly three, as well as preparations for future issues. A research symposium presentation could explain the processes and technical knowledge needed for publishing such a journal as well as the issues surrounding open-access scholarship.

  Student tasks and responsibilities:

  The primary duties of the student will be to aid in the transition of finalized scholarly essays and accompanying images onto the online platform (using wordpress) and format them as downloadable pdfs. Student will also contribute to the promotion of essays on social media and through other paths. Additional duties may develop, related to the design and organization of the website as well as planning for future issues. Student will also research back issues and brainstorm new ways to promote and share the journal’s research.

  ---

  Research on dialects of English in Oklahoma (RODEO)

  The Language Studies Lab in the Department of English houses a collection of dialect data from all over Oklahoma. The collection includes data across an urban-rural gradient, inter-generational data, and limited data from minority groups in the state. We are in the process of organizing, transcribing, and storing the data in improved ways to support more types of research. We are also looking to increase our collection, especially for minority groups, which although present in our collection, are under-represented. The student researcher would continue to support making our current collection more accessible as well as help us grow our collection. Part of the new data collection can be tailored toward a specific question of the student’s guided choosing.

  Student tasks and responsibilities:

  The student will make the data collection more user-friendly. They will continue to cut audio using open source software such as Audacity and Praat. They will create transcriptions using open source software such as eLan and other automated systems. They will code data for specific words using data coding software, such as NVivo. They will work on protecting participant information while allowing more student researchers to work with this data.

  The student will also collect new data with a new data collection instrument, integrate this new data into the collection, and work on their own research question on the data. This may involve further transcription, vowel measurements, and transcription.

  The student will have opportunities to present the data and their work with the data to public audiences. The lab plans to do a presentation for the Center of Oklahoma Studies in September. We hope the student will present work on the new data they helped collect at the undergraduate research symposium.

• Geosciences and Environmental Studies

  Oklahoma's Changing Hydroclimate

  Compared to the more humid East, the Western half of the country is an area defined by, and often limited by, its availability of water. Oklahoma finds itself precariously positioned at this divide, and as climate continues to warm, research suggests that the dryer conditions more often associated with the West will shift eastward. How changing climate and precipitation regimes will impact water resources for the state are not yet fully understood and require further research. Questions of interest are: How have precipitation patterns (and amounts) changed in recent years? How will changing water regimes impact stream flow and local water bodies, or have they changed already? As temperatures increase, so do rates of evaporation and crop water demand. What will changing precipitation regimes mean for local water availability in a state with a large amount of agriculture? Through an analysis of the current literature and investigations of locally available weather data, many of these questions can be explored and lend insight to Oklahoma’s changing hydroclimate.

  Student tasks and responsibilities:

  These will vary over the term and based on student interest and skillset, but some examples of tasks: Reading and accessing scientific literature, literature review (writing about the literature in a condensed format), downloading and working with environmental data (ie, weather or streamflow data) in multiple formats (csv or netcdf, most likely), simple statistical analysis and data visualizations either in excel or a programming language.

• Life Sciences

  Infectious diseases in Caribbean lizards

  This project will focus on evaluating the prevalence of malaria and other endogenous parasites in lizards. Very little is known about the presence of malaria in Caribbean lizard populations, and new species of malaria have recently been discovered and named. Malaria in other species is known to cause population decreases, crashes, and extirpations. We have previously collected blood samples from ~600 individual Anolis lizards, and will now stain them and use a microscope to identify the presence of malaria. We have also previously generated sequence data which we will use bioinformatics techniques to mine for evidence of common malarial parasites. We expect that this will provide an in-depth comparison of microscope based and genetic based methods for detecting malaria, and will provide some baseline data for the geographic extent of and prevalence of parasite infection.

  Student tasks and responsibilities:

  The student will have the opportunity to be mentored and embedded into a research experience that will provide a solid entry into the mechanics of conducting research, generating data, maintaining lab records, and analyzing data. They will be provided the opportunity to be a co-author on resulting publications. I anticipate that the student will be able to present some aspects of this work at scientific symposia or conferences.

  ---

  Controlling Pests via sensory Inhibition: Expression, Purification, and characterization of Pheromone-binding Protein

  The ability to respond to chemical stimuli is a fundamental behavior of all organisms. Lepidoptera male moths have an exquisitely sensitive olfactory system that is capable of perceiving airborne pheromone molecules released by females and responding to them over great distances. Pheromone binding proteins (PBPs) located in the antennae of male moths play an important role in olfaction. They are carrier proteins that pick up volatile hydrophobic pheromone molecules at high pH and transport them across the aqueous sensillar lymph releasing at low pH near the membrane-bound olfactory neuron. Unraveling the mysteries of pheromone binding and release controlled by changes in pH is critical not only to our understanding of insect olfaction but also for any future investment on control of the olfactory behavior of deleterious insects that are voracious agricultural pests of many important crops through pheromone based integrated pest management.

  The mechanism of pheromone binding and release by pheromone-binding protein of an invasive pest, Asian corn borer will be investigated. The investigation will include expression of the protein, purification through chromatographic techniques, and characterization of the pure protein using various biochemical and biophysical techniques.

  Student tasks and responsibilities:

  Student will work either with the mentor or her research group member (grad student) learning various techniques used in our laboratory for biochemistry work. Once the student is familiar with these, they will carry out these research under our guidance. The research will involve preparing media, and buffers, expression of proteins, and their purification using dialysis, anion exchange, and size exclusion chromatography respectively. Pure proteins will be analyzed by fluorescence, and other techniques.

• Computational and Physical Sciences

  Computational modeling of social media networks

  The existence of social media forums help people to receive updates almost immediately either from direct news sources (news media) or from indirect sources (online friends/social networks). Around 68% of U.S. adults use social media to get daily updates on news and most of them find the news to be misleading or inaccurate. Such misinformation can be identified with several factors like how they propagate in the social network?, what content is being shared in which community?, who is responding to the shared content in social media?, and how they are responding to the shared content?. In this research project we will focus on the latter on how the information is being perceived over the course of its propagation in the social network. The primary goal of this project is to capture characteristics of conversations using computational and statistical models based on the user text and dynamics of user preferences and arguments on social media.

  Student tasks and responsibilities:

  Students involved in this project will require basic Python programming skills along with motivation to get involved into Data Science research. The student worker will be working with problems like social media analysis, network mining, and machine learning. The student worker will also be collecting data from social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit. This research project will refine the knowledge of student worker in data science and increase Python programming skills for data analytics. All these skills would be extremely useful for the student worker if they wants to do summer internships in data science or even apply for graduate school.

• Behavioral and Social Sciences

  Identity and power status in global terror organizations

  One of the great puzzles in terrorism research is what role does communal identity and power status play out in terrorist organization targeting decisions. Is ethnicity a “weapon of the weak” that allows discriminated ethnic groups to strike back against more politically powerful ethnic groups? Or is terrorism used in an enforcement role; meant to keep politically disadvantaged ethnicities subservient to more powerful groups? As part of an effort to solve this puzzle, I have been mentoring a team of undergraduate student researchers who are collecting data on terrorist organizations listed in the Global Terrorism Database. Students research and code whether each organization claims to represent, recruits from, or receives financial support from a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group. They also catalog the “power status” of this group, using the coding from a separate cross-national dataset known as the Ethnic Power Relations dataset. While this team has so far completed coding for groups operating in Europe and North America, data on Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia has yet to be collected. An AURCA student would join the team in finishing this data collection effort.

  Student tasks and responsibilities:

  The student will work as part of a research team collecting data on terrorist organizations listed in the Global Terrorism Database. Using search engines to find reliable information on each terrorist group from academic, government, or other trustworthy sources, the student will research and code whether each organization claims to represent, recruits from, or receives financial support from a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group. Initial research will focus on African countries, with students selecting other countries in other regions if time permits. Students will input this data into a shared Google spreadsheet document. They will also use this dataset to catalog their information sources. The student will also have the opportunity to learn basic data cleaning and analysis skills in STATA statistical software package.

  ---

  OKState Newlywed Project

  The OKState Newlywed Project is a longitudinal study examining affective, neuroendocrine, behavioral, and social-cognitive processes that impact marital satisfaction trajectories and stability. We are recruiting newlywed couples from Stillwater and the surrounding communities extending out to Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Couples will complete an intake baseline survey, attend an in-person laboratory session, complete daily diary surveys, and then complete follow-up surveys every four months for the first couple years of marriage. This project utilizes a multi-method approach, including self-report, behavioral, physiological, and implicit social-cognitive methods, with the aim of advancing theory on long-term romantic relationship maintenance. Thus, this project will provide hands-on experience and mentoring with a variety of Psychological research methods.

  Student tasks and responsibilities:

  This is a Project Manager position; thus, the AURCA student will help oversee all aspects of this project. For recruitment, responsibilities will include flyer distribution and social media advertisement. For intake, responsibilities will include making phone calls to prospective participants, scheduling couples for their in-person laboratory session, and sending couples their baseline survey. For participant management, responsibilities will include sending reminders to participants to complete surveys, running in-person laboratory sessions (often during evenings and on weekends), scheduling follow-up surveys, and filing requests for participant payments.