For-Credit Research Assistantship

Academic Field: American Literature
Research Topic: The Collected Letters of Carson McCullers

Brief description of project and RA duties: Student research assistant will help Professor Carlos Dews with the research and editorial work on his edition of The Collected Letters of Carson McCullers to be published by HarperCollins in 2024. The specific duties will include biographical and historical research on those with whom Carson McCullers corresponded and help in preparation of the manuscript of the letters of Carson McCullers for publication. This work will provide the student research assistant with valuable “hands on” experience with a  major publishing project and allow the student to learn a great deal about the life and work of one of America’s major writers.  The research assistant will help in the copyediting, fact checking, and preparing the manuscript for submission to the publisher.

The research assistant should be detail-oriented, meticulous, and enjoy detailed textual work. Most of the work will be done independently but the research assistant must be available to meet weekly with Professor Dews on Tuesday or Wednesday. Students applying for this research assistantship need not be English majors. The tangible outcomes of the project will include the complete manuscript of the McCullers letters project. The student will keep a log of their work on the project and account for the work done during the 45 hours on the project. Through weekly online meetings and guided research tasks, the student will learn significant research skills in dealing with manuscripts, letters, and other unpublished texts.

Sponsoring Professor: Carlos Dews ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: The research assistant will work to ensure the accuracy of the completed manuscript of the Collected Letters of Carson McCullers. This work will include biographical and historical research as well as careful proofreading and editing of the manuscript.

Academic Field: Art History
Research Topic: Analysis of a newly discovered seventeenth-century painting: "The Death of Cleopatra", by Andrea Vaccaro

Brief description of project and RA duties: The project investigates the historical significance of an unpublished painting in a private collection, “The Death of Cleopatra”, by Andrea Vaccaro, the leading painter in Naples around 1660. The Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, took her life in 30 B.C.E. to avoid shame as the political prisoner of Octavian. In Baroque art, she is usually immortalized as a romantic, dangerous temptress who self-destructed by an asp bite to her breast.

Why is Cleopatra’s suicide portrayed instead by Vaccaro as a chaste Christian martyrdom? The project will build on the researcher’s publications on Andrea Vaccaro, and the work of feminist art historian, Mary Garrard, who devotes a chapter to the iconography of “Lucretia and Cleopatra” in her monograph on Artemisia Gentileschi. Reading knowledge of English is required and Italian preferred. The assistant should be a junior or a senior and experienced in doing bibliographic searches.

Sponsoring Professor: Anna Tuck-Scala ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: The assistant will search for all sources on Italian seventeenth-century painting that address the subject of the Death of Cleopatra. Comparable depictions to that by Andrea Vaccaro will be collected. The search comprises all relevant books, articles, and electronic sources, with particular attention given to footnotes. The research assistant should search print sources (books) in the JCU library and electronic sources (for example, jstor database articles) for information and images of Italian seventeenth-century paintings depicting the Death of Cleopatra. Attention should be given to footnotes for compiling a thorough bibliographical search.

A written report will be prepared on all the works depicting the Death of Cleopatra. An analysis will be made to assess the originality of Andrea Vaccaro’s portrayal of Cleopatra as a martyr or saint. Vaccaro’s painting will then be analyzed in the context of the artist’s oeuvre. How does the painting shed light on the art, patronage, and society of mid-seventeenth century Naples? The assistant’s report will be the basis for writing an article with the goal of submitting it for publication.

Academic Field: Artificial Intelligence
Research Topic: Translation

Brief description of project and RA duties: This is a literature review, and no special background is required. The subject of the literature review is 'academic and commercial models for language translation'. I want to know what work has been done, who are the major players, and what are the key benchmarks for translation quality in this field.

Sponsoring Professor: Thomas Hope ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: This is a literature review project. The student will conduct web-based research, using a systematic search methodology, and write up the results.

Academic Field: Communications and Media Studies
Research Topic: Media and the Environment: Researching the relationship between media, environment and climate change. The purpose of this research is to gather and organize materials related to media and the environment and climate, and to organize them for a web resource.

Brief description of project and RA duties: The student will perform a variety of tasks for the professor to assist in researching and creating resources for an ecomedia literacy resource hub. The student and professor will set fixed hours during the week, but most research may be done independently.

Sponsoring Professor: Antonio Lopez ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: Research tasks: 

• Organize media texts related to media and the environment
• Research ecological footprint of the technological gadget production process
• Research ecological footprint of social networks
• Track down journal articles and books, and make interlibrary loan requests identified by the professor
• Write short summaries of specific research tasks

Academic Field: Communications and Media Studies
Research Topic: Social media/data culture

Brief description of project and RA duties: The RA will help the professor with researching topics and speakers for the fall season of the lecture series on critical data culture Digital Delights and Disturbances. They will assist the professor in preparing a critical biography and a research database connected to the series. They will also write reflection pieces for all the talks already scheduled for SP23, attend the workshops and produce critical reports. All the writing will be credited to the RA.

Sponsoring Professor: Donatella Della Ratta ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: searching databases on critical data culture/reading special issues and journal articles on critical data culture/updating the professor on a regular basis re findings, possible speakers/topics for the FL23 season, etc./writing critical essays when needed/conducting interviews with invited speakers.

Academic Field: Communication and Media Studies, Political and Social Sciences
Research Topic: The urban night in Rome

Brief description of project and RA duties: Prof. Diamanti is working on a research project on the urban night in Rome. The project is part of the wider Night Studies Network of which she is an active member, co-leading the Media & the Night research axis (see short project description). She is particularly interested in studying the urban night in Rome. Rome has a vibrant nightlife scene, and was one of the fore-runner Western cities to implement a night-time economy plan in the 1970-1980s. The research aims to map out the current nightlife in the Italian capital, with particular interest in nightlife activities that promote and favor inclusive and safe spaces. The project will also focus on the representation and imaginary of the night through audio-visual media, and the politics of the night. Particularly, students will help with:

1) Cataloguing media representations of Rome’s nightlife and night spaces (1970s to today) by researching films, TV series, specialized press and other media forms.
2) Researching and providing a literature review of academic sources on nightlife and night-time economy in Rome.
3) Possibly helping the professor with ethnographic research material (mapping night-time spaces, editing audio-visual recordings, etc.).

Sponsoring Professor: Eleonora Diamanti ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties:
1) Create a database/catalogue of the assigned media (documentaries, films, specialized press, etc.).
2) Research and select academic articles relevant to media and film studies on the night.
3) Research and select academic articles relevant to urban geography, ethnographic studies of the night and the politics of the night.
4) Produce a literature review and summaries of the assigned research topic.
5) Provide a complete formatted bibliography.
6) Provide a presentation of their findings, and feedback on the professor’s ongoing research.

Academic Field: Communications, Studio Design, Marketing, and Business Administration
Research Topic: Independent Film Industry and Production.

Brief description of project and RA duties: The leading professor, Jenn Lindsay, is a social scientist and a documentary filmmaker. Presently she is in various stages of production and post-production of several different documentary film projects. Students in digital video production, studio design, marketing, and business administration fields are invited to assist with various dimensions of this film initiative.

Production assistants will help with filming, editing, writing, and designing content; marketing assistants will help with research, writing articles on the indie film industry and diversity in media, and branding activities; and business strategy assistants will help with the day-to-day demands of indie film business, ranging from finance, project management, sales strategy, and company direction.

Sponsoring Professor: Jenn Lindsay ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: Research assistants will be assigned tasks according to their goals and strengths, and work collaboratively with other team members on a regular basis. They will learn a wide range of information about independent film and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) industries. After an initial orientation period, assistant(s) shall meet with the professor and in teams at least two times weekly to discuss assignments and work progress.

Assistants in every field will deliver one presentation during the semester on topics relevant to the indie film and diversity industry. Past topics have been fair use of copyrighted materials, the power of storytelling, film financing, co-working spaces in Rome, how to do a competitor analysis, etc.

Academic field: Computer Science 
Research topic: Development of a Python program to support Academic advising at JCU 

Brief description of project and RA duties: The objective of this project is to design and implement a Python program to support Academic advising at JCU, which is meant to be used by the JCU Registrar’s office. The input to the program is a list of courses attended by a student, each equipped with all relevant information; this list could be directly downloaded from the database or provided to the program in a different format. 

Two main goals of the project have been identified. First, the program should produce a report on the student’s standing with respect to the graduation requirements. This may include the computation of the number of credits and GPA, and an automatic check of Proficiency, General Distribution, and Major-specific requirements. Second, the program should create a file with the student’s graduation checklist, filled with the courses already taken by the student. Based on the number of students appointed for the project, one or both of these goals may be selected for implementation. The ideal number of assistants for the project is 2, but any number between 1 and 4 would work, with a possible adjustment of the specific goals. 

Together with the technical work on the Python code, which represents the main duty within this project, the Research Assistant(s) will be asked to interface with the Registrar's Office to define the details of the program specifications, simulating the typical process of interaction with a customer. 

Sponsoring Professor: Patrizio Angelini ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023 

Research assistant’s regular duties: The project will be structured according to the typical phases of a software engineering process: analysis, design, implementation. 

Analysis: The Research Assistant(s) will first interview JCU Registrar office personnel to understand the requirements and define the specific goals of the project. 
Design: Based on the outcome of this analysis, the Research Assistant(s) will design the architectural structure of the program, with its main components and their interactions. 

Implementation: This phase consists of the actual implementation in Python of the program designed in the previous phase and represents the main activity in terms of time (expected 60-70% of the total project time). Each of the three phases will require the production of a corresponding deliverable. For the analysis, a written report of the interview and the resulting list of identified requirements. For the design, a diagram describing the program architecture and a list of functionalities. For the implementation, the actual program, and its written documentation. The Faculty will act as a sort of project manager, supervising all three phases and meeting with the Research Assistant(s) on a weekly basis during the entire development of the project. Occasionally, the Faculty will also contribute to the technical aspects. 

The guidance of the Faculty will support the student(s) in improving the soft and hard skills that are naturally involved in this project, which include communication, teamwork, and analytical and technical skills.

Academic Field: Economics and Law
Research Topic: Labor market discrimination; Maternity leave policies; Size and structure of the productive system.

Brief description of project and RA duties: We explore persistent gender discrimination by examining maternity leave polices and how they may impact the survival rate of small, knowledge intensive firms when the human capital for operations has a high proportion of value added. To the extent firms are risk-adverse, women of child-bearing age would not be hired or promoted to more senior high-skilled knowledge intensive positions in small firms. This would contribute to gender discrimination in firms’ hiring policies, which in turn would result in a slower accumulation of human capital (experience) of female workers throughout their careers. As a consequence, countries with greater protection for maternity leave and a larger proportion of SMEs in knowledge intensive sectors would be expected to have greater gender discrimination than those who do not.

Sponsoring Professor: Simona Costagli ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: The Research Assistant is expected to do background research on the history of maternity leave policies in the OECD countries and develop a classification rubric regarding their key characteristics. This will then be used to establish country groups that will be the unit of analysis for the discrimination study. Meetings with the professor will be scheduled on a regular basis ‒ online or in person ‒ according to the professor’s and the student’s schedule.

Academic Field: Entrepreneurship / Business
Research Topic: What is the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on Entrepreneurship?

Brief description of project and RA duties: The project investigates the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship. Covid-19 pandemic has severely affected the business environment worldwide, providing serious challenges but also new opportunities for entrepreneurship. The Research Assistant will support the professor in preparing a chapter on “Covid-19 pandemic and Entrepreneurship” for the Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics (to be published by Springer). The Handbook is a large multi-disciplinary reference work which provides an integrated picture of knowledge about the economic and social behaviors and interactions of human beings on markets, in households, in companies and in societies.

Sponsoring Professor: Alina Sorgner ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: Research Assistant’s duties include providing support in researching and systematizing the relevant literature; identifying key publications, relevant research questions and new directions in the literature; providing feedback on preliminary versions of the manuscript; formalizing the manuscript (unifying citations, document formatting, proof-reading).

Academic Field: Marketing
Research Topic: Social campaigns in the struggle to reduce food waste: Non-profit organizations in the Metaverse

Brief description of project and RA duties: This research explores the application of promotional strategies in the Metaverse to support non-profit organizations in achieving their goals, specifically the reduction of food waste. The research assistant will provide support in the data collection phase of the research.

Sponsoring Professor: Alessandro Feri ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: The research assistant will perform research activities within the context of non-profit organizations in the Metaverse. The research assistant will be asked to provide supervised support in data collection, namely focus groups, interviews and netnography.

Academic Field: Marketing
Research Topic: Post-Covid Change in Consumer Behavior: Hospitality Industry

Brief description of project and RA duties: Research assistant will participate in primary data collection (interview, focus groups, survey) and literature review for the ongoing research on post-covid changes in consumer behavior. The first study was conducted on the restaurant business in Italy, research assistant will work on the second study extending the previous work further. While working on the project research assistant will master primary data collection skills in marketing. Requirement for this research assistant position: Italian native speaker, as the data will be collected in Italian.

Sponsoring Professor: Tetyana Kholod ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: Research assistant is expected to: (1) conduct the primary data collection under supervision of professor: interviews, focus group, survey; (2) read related literature and prepare the draft literature review.

Academic Field: Media Studies
Research Topic: Music Video

Brief description of project and RA duties: Assist Prof in organizing material for book, write abstracts of articles, use of digital bibliographic and reference tools like Zotero

Sponsoring Professor: Peter Sarram ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: Develop bibliography, write abstracts for articles, learn use of digital bibliography and reference.

Academic Field: Neuroscience
Research Topic: Neuroscience of Language

Brief description of project and RA duties: This is a library project. The student will need to conduct their own research, and to summarise their results clearly and concisely. No special background skills or experience are required.

Sponsoring Professor: Thomas Hope ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: The research assistant will attempt to answer the question: 'What language tasks are used BOTH (a) to measure language impairment severity; and (b) to train or evaluate deep natural language processing models?' This is part of a larger project that aims to use data from individuals with impaired language to tune and optimize deep natural language processing models. Essentially, I want to know if I need to run a new study with patients, or if one or more relevant studies have already been reported. The research assistant will do this research and write up the results in a brief report. This project will teach research assistants how to do their own research, and how to read and interpret scientific literature from two quite different domains of research.

Academic Field: Neuroscience
Research Topic: Translation

Brief description of project and RA duties: This is a literature review project. The research assistant will research the neuroscience of translation (i.e., translating from one language to another), and write a short report on the results.

Sponsoring Professor: Thomas Hope ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: The research assistant will conduct a systematic review of the scientific literature concerning the neuroscience of translation. The focus will be on tasks used in-scanner, key results, and broader theoretical models of the neurobiology of translation.

Academic Field: Philosophy
Research Topic: Anti-essentialism in feminist philosophy

Brief description of project and RA duties: What does it mean to think that gender is not “essential” or “real,” or that it is “socially constructed”? What are the implications of this for more specific issues in feminist philosophy, such as the body, sexuality, intersectionality, or epistemic injustice?

Our aim will be to “map” and evaluate some significant philosophical answers to these questions. We will meet to discuss the progress and results of the research, and to help you to write a literature review of selected sources and themes, which we will chose based on your interests. You will thus develop not only your understanding of the relevant ideas and arguments, but also your ability to undertake research, explore it in discussion and in writing, and develop your own ideas about it.

Sponsoring Professor: Tom Bailey ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: The research assistant will examine some of the main contributions to the relevant philosophical debates and prepare a scholarly literature review of them. They will first prepare a list of relevant sources, based on an initial bibliography provided by the professor and further research undertaken through the University library, with the help of the professor and the library staff. The assistant will then prepare an annotated bibliography of ten or so of the most significant sources. Finally, the assistant will write a 2000-word scholarly literature review of a more restricted selection of sources and themes, to be decided based on the assistant’s interests. At least four hour-long meetings will be held with the professor, to guide the assistant in the research and writing, to review and discuss the work produced, and to teach relevant research and writing skills.

Academic Field: Philosophy
Research Topic: State regulation of the family

Brief description of project and RA duties: When and how may the state regulate or interfere in the family? How do the relevant goods and bads of parenting and childhood explain this? Our aim will be to “map” and evaluate some significant philosophical answers to these questions. We will meet to discuss the progress and results of the research, and to help you to write a literature review of selected sources and themes, which we will choose based on your interests. You will thus develop not only your understanding of the relevant ideas and arguments, but also your ability to undertake research, explore it in discussion and in writing, and develop your own ideas about it.

Sponsoring Professor: Tom Bailey ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: The research assistant will examine some of the main contributions to the relevant philosophical debates and prepare a scholarly literature review of them. They will first prepare a list of relevant sources, based on an initial bibliography provided by the professor and further research undertaken through the University library, with the help of the professor and the library staff. The assistant will then prepare an annotated bibliography of ten or so of the most significant sources. Finally, the assistant will write a 2000-word scholarly literature review of a more restricted selection of sources and themes, to be decided based on the assistant’s interests. At least four hour-long meetings will be held with the professor, to guide the assistant in the research and writing, to review and discuss the work produced, and to teach relevant research and writing skills.

Academic Field: Photography - Studio Art - Visual Media Marketing
Research Topic: Contemporary Music and Visual Media

Brief description of project and RA duties: The project aims to explore the new frontiers of communication in the musical field, through the study of the production of video clips, flyers, posters, social media promotion, and the production and realization of a specific project around an artist.

Sponsoring Professor: Paolo Soriani ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties:
1) Create a database/catalog of the analyzed media (videoclip, websites, promo, social.)
2) Research and select articles relevant to the assigned topic (visual culture and music)
3) Support the teacher in realizing the media around the selected musical project
4) Organize and finalize the project using software for photos and visuals
5) Provide feedback on the professor’s ongoing research.

Academic Field: Political Science
Research Topic: The rise (fall) and durability of the European Radical Right: Explaining electoral variations in 2022

Brief description of project and RA duties: The bulk of media commentators portray the electoral fortunes of Radical Right Parties (RRPs) in Europe as very much a one way upward ticket, where the parties are seemingly universally on the electoral rise. While evidence from 2022, in France, Sweden and Italy indicates that the Rassemblement National (National Rally), the Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats) and the Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) have made significant (but differning) electoral impact in national elections this calendar year, elsewhere, in Denmark, the Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) suffered a significant electoral setback polling just 2.6% in the 2022 general election, compared to 8.7% in 2019 and 21.2% in 2015.

The Danish case reinforces evidence from elsewhere in Europe, where three of the leading contemporary, European RRPs - the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party), the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Austrian Freedom Party) and the Fremskrittspartiet (Norwegian Progress Party) - all polled less in their most recent parliamentary elections than in the comparable, previous contest. Against the backdrop of the cost-of-living and energy crises, the ‘demand-side’ conditions remain universally favourable across Europe for Radical Right ‘challenger parties’ but it, nevertheless, remains misleading to generalize about their holistic electorrise.

Focusing primarily on the ‘supply-side’ messaging emanating from the parties themselves, the goal of this research project is to investigate data from the 2022 elections in France, Italy, Sweden and Denmark to explain why certain RRPs continue to advance in electoral terms, while others have suffered electoral setbacks. It seeks to ascertain what are the ‘supply side’ variables that have caused these differences. The project will focus on key areas of comparative analysis, such as the ‘radical right gender gap’, the role of ‘climate change denial’, Euroscepticism as an issue, and media portrayals of each party in their respective countries. It will also look at the centrality in each case study of the traditional Radical Right issue of immigration and of anti-Islam rhetoric.

In terms of the role of the research assistant, the goal will be to provide key linguistic support with data analysis in the Italian and/or Swedish/Danish languages. The role will focus on translation and analysis of party manifestos and policy documents, opinion polls, leadership speeches and general website content including newspaper articles. It will also involve conducting some primary research, namely Content Analysis of key-words in party manifestos and campaign leadership speeches.

With regard to the outcomes for the project, the aim will be to submit two different papers to refereed political science journals on the electoral fortunes of European RRPs by the end of 2023.

Sponsoring Professor: Nicholas Startin ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: The role will focus on translation and analysis of Italian and/or Norwegian/Danish political data as follows:
1) RRP party manifestos and policy documents,
2) National opinion poll and exit polls,
3) campaign leadership speeches of RRP leaders
4) general website searches including newspaper articles
5) Content Analysis of key-words in party manifestos and campaign leadership speeches.

Academic Field: Political science, gender studies
Research Topic: Intersectionality and Brexit

Brief description of project and RA duties: Research assistant will survey newspaper coverage and research on intersectional aspects of Brexit

Sponsoring Professor: Tara Keenan ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: Student will search databases and compile annotated bibliography, student will meet with me once per week throughout term.

Academic Field: Political and social science
Research Topic: Political and social science

Brief description of project and RA duties: This project explores the relative successes and weaknesses of various social movements campaigning for legal reform and criminal justice in Italy. Research assistants will help the professor in identifying and summarizing the most useful theoretical approaches and collecting empirical data on specific case-studies. They will also be expected to participate in weekly meetings to discuss our collective progress.

Sponsoring Professor: Isabella Clough Marinaro ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: Research assistants will write up summaries of readings, collect reports and empirical data on specific social movements, possibly carry out interviews and help collate the information for easy retrieval in the future. They will also attend weekly meetings with the rest of the research team.

Academic Field: Psychology
Research Topic: publication on problems of beginning therapists

Brief description of project and RA duties: Read and sort through email replies to open-ended questions on student therapists’ experiences and needs. Categorizing these experiences and needs.

Sponsoring Professor: Elaine Luti ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: The research assistant will read through replies to an open-ended survey where I ask beginning therapists and analytic candidates what they would have liked to have been taught before starting working or specific problems they have encountered that they didn’t know how to solve. These may include short stories of difficulties they had in specific cases, or they could be generic topics.

The assistant will, with my help, come up with categories of types of needs and experiences and classify the replies or parts of replies into these categories. These will be the basis of a publication that will be an informal guide to psychotherapy. If published, the student's name will also appear.

Academic Field: Psychology
Research Topic: Creativity and Problem solving

Brief description of project and RA duties: We are in search of motivated undergraduate RAs who will help contribute to our ever-growing body of research and will help out on a current project aimed to understand the neural and cognitive functioning of Creativity and problem-solving.

You will work on one of the following projects:
- Role of novelty on learning and Memory
- Effects of novelty on creativity and problem solving
- Developing a new scale on Socio-Cognitive Polarization
- Domestic violence awareness

Sponsoring Professor: Carola Salvi ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: 
- Helping to do research on creativity and problem solving (bibliographic research, data analysis, etc)
- Collaborating with the Psychology department in coordinating research and data analysis
- Participate in weekly project-meetings

Academic Field: Psychology
Research Topic: Social robotics

Brief description of project and RA duties: The project revolves around the research question of whether, and if yes how, humans' working self-concept shifts after being exposed to a robot, so that they temporarily become more aware of their traits that set them apart from robots. If this mechanism indeed exists, a logical follow up question would be what the consequences are for behavior.

At the moment, we are setting up initial online experiment. Any RA willing to work with me during the 2023 Spring semester would most likely be involved in: literature review for the paper following this experiment; setting up the data collection template; data cleaning and if necessary recoding; writing up results; designing a follow up study. Time allowing, they may additionally be involved in an in-person data collection.

Thus, I am looking for someone with a keen interest in conducting research, who is able to critically think about research design and the implications & consequences of design choices. Ideally you will have completed your PS210 (methodology) course.

Sponsoring Professor: Merel Keijsers ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties:
- literature research: finding relevant papers, writing a short summary on them, and incorporating them in the paper.
- data collection setup: preparing Qualtrics surveys and/or MTurk tasks for data collection.
- data validation and cleanup: cross-referencing responses from Qualtrics and Mturk, removing participants who failed attention checks, identifying outliers, running basic summary statistics (e.g. mean and standard deviation).
- help with proofreading the paper: identifying errors (e.g. contradictions and inconsistencies, typos), repetitions, and gaps in the argument.
- brainstorming the follow up study: coming up with follow up questions, potential confounds or alternative explanations for the current results, drawing a rough design for follow up study.

Academic Field: Strategic Management
Research Topic: Lamborghini and the New Challenges in the Automotive Industry

Brief description of project and RA duties: The current research project intends to investigate the history and the current challenges of the luxury automotive manufacturer Lamborghini, against the backdrop of the automotive industry. It consists of three parts: 

(1) a survey of the existing academic literature on the automotive industry, to determine the trends and challenges that it is currently facing; 
(2) an in-depth study of Lamborghini;
(3) the writing of a case study to be used for teaching.

Ideally I would need two to three RAs, one to conduct the literature review, one to research the company, and one to help write the case. If the research leads to publication, the participating student(s) shall be named as co-author(s).

Sponsoring Professor: Silvia Pulino ([email protected])
Semester of assistantship: Spring 2023

Research assistant’s regular duties: The work may be divided among the RAs by topic, or they can collaborate on all of the topics. The areas to be covered include: the literary review, using databases to search for relevant sources, identify themes, and organize the resulting ideas; the study of the company, including if possible interviews with management; the drafting of the case study, under the guidance of the professor. Students will meet with their advisor on a weekly basis to report findings, discuss results and develop the research strategy further.