Each year the Illinois Informatics Institute sponsors an undergraduate research assistant competition.
INFO PhD students and Faculty Affiliates are invited to be research mentors and are asked to provide a brief description of the project(s) they have available. All INFO minors are encouraged to apply for these positions, which provide a stipend of $12.50/hour for 8-10 hours/week during the fall semester (with the option to continue through the spring semester provided that the student makes satisfactory progress).
This year Informatics has selected a total of 11 students to work with 10 mentors on a variety of projects from across campus:
- Adam Rogers (senior in IS/IT) will be working with Dr. Michael Twidale (iSchool) on a project looking at how people learn new technologies
- Ali Alagha (senior in HPA) will be working with Dr. Ian Brooks (iSchool) on the “INDICATOR: Monitoring the Health of a Community” project
- Jacob Bentley (senior in ECON/POLI) will be working at the Cline Center for Democracy on a project using text analytics to understand peace, conflict and social change
- Aishwarya Raj (sophomore in BIOC) will be working with Dr. Liudmila Mainzer (IGB/NCSA) constructing and comparing gene,metabolic and signaling networks for organisms across the tree of life
- Ehsan Khan (senior in GEOG/GIS) will be working with Dr. Marilyn O’Hara Ruiz (VetMed) on Mapping the Legacy of Arsenic
- Yixin Zou (senior in ADV) will be working with Aseel Addawood (INFO PhD student) on factors influencing attitude formation for controversial topics
- Nur Amalina Abdul Razak (junior in Actuarial Science) and Andrew Marturano (senior in PSYC) will be working with Hsiao Ying Huang (INFO PhD student) examining the usability of mobile applications in mental health interventions
- Toral Shastri (senior in MCB) will be working with Dr. Les Gasser (iSchool) on an NCSA project titled “Simulating Social Systems at Scale”
- Grant Schumock (junior in NPRE) will be working with Dr. Zahra Mohaghegh (NPRE) in the Socio-Technical Risk Analysis lab
- Christine Chan (senior in IB) will be working with Dr. Amy Marshall-Colon (PLBIO) using public datasets to identify signaling crosstalk networks in plants