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[COGDEVSOC] Research Coordinator Opportunities in Connecticut

Research Coordinator, Connecticut Project

 

The TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health (TMW Center) develops science-based interventions, tools, and technologies to help parents and caregivers interact with young children in ways that maximize brain development. A rich language environment is critical to healthy brain development, however few tools exist to measure the quality or quantity of these environments. Access to this type of data allows caregivers to enhance interactions in real-time and gives policy-makers insight in how to best build policies that have a population-level impact.

Job Summary

The Research Coordinator will report to the Senior Project Manager and shall provide on-the-ground coordination, implementation, and research support. The Research Coordinator will work closely with Connecticut-based infant and toddler childcare providers and TMW Center research and curriculum staff. The Research Coordinator shall be responsible for recruiting and consenting study participants, providing regular implementation and technical support to study participants, data collection, and operational and logistical coordination of various study activities.

As a primary on-the-ground point of contact for study participants, the Research Coordinator shall build positive relationships with childcare centers, classroom teachers, families and OEC staff to ensure strong communication and a successful research partnership with the TMW Center.

Responsibilities

Participant Outreach, Recruitment & Data Collection:

  • Serves as a primary point of contact for current and future research study participants.
  • At the direction of TMW staff, conducts targeted outreach and recruitment to study participants (child care sites, early educators, parents, etc.). Organizes and coordinates recruitment activities, in collaboration with TMW staff.
  • Obtains and maintains consents for all program participants in accordance with IRB protocol and TMW research standards.
  • Ensures ongoing and new research subjects are on-boarded properly.
  • Regularly reports updates on participant recruitment, study progress, and study completion to relevant parties.
  • Partners with TMW Center staff members and other stakeholders to ensure current and upcoming studies have adequate amounts of participants.
  • Collaborates actively with TMW Center staff members and external stakeholders to strategize approaches for pursuing new participants and partners. 
  • Maintains regular contact with study participants, updating them on study progress and ensuring that their contact information is updated on a routine basis. Maintains records of all communication efforts with participants.
  • Implements data collection at the direction of TMW Center staff. Ensures quality of data collection and adherence to best practices. 
  • Supports TMW Center researchers with other aspects of outreach, recruitment, consent, data collection and support as requested.

Implementation & Participant Support:

  • Under the direction of TMW staff, implements the TMW Center’s ECE professional development strategy and novel technology within study sites (childcare and early education classroom settings) and provides ongoing support for implementing teachers and site leadership.
  • In coordination with and under the direction of TMW staff, provides implementation support, coaching, and training to study participants, ensuring that study activities are delivered with fidelity and that technical support is available promptly. This includes but is not limited to: regularly visiting study sites across Connecticut for routine in-person check-ins; providing technical assistance, troubleshooting and on-call technical and implementation support to study participants (including outside of business hours, as needed); ensuring proper implementation and delivery of TMW program in accordance with study protocol; tracking data related to these processes and other aspects of implementation; supporting TMW Manager of Training and other TMW staff by coordinating and/or facilitating training sessions and regular meetings for implementing staff.

Research Support:

  • With other TMW teams, helps coordinate and implement formative testing, early pilots and research studies in partner sites.
  • With other TMW teams, engages with study participants and other partners to collect data and gather user feedback to inform device optimization, program refinement, professional development model and implementation model.
  • Supports implementing staff within study sites (childcare and early education classroom settings).
  • Facilitates and coordinates video recording, data collection and other classroom-based research activities, as needed, under the direction of TMW’s Research team.
  • Issues payments and other incentives to study participants.  Ensures all payments are issued correctly and tracked with fidelity. Ensures full compliance with all University and funder obligations related to human subject payments and recordkeeping.
  • Distributes technology and assists with inventory management, coordination and delivery logistics for technological devices and other materials provided to study sites.

Partnership Building:

  • Builds and nurtures relationships with child care centers, classroom teachers, families, OEC staff and other stakeholders to ensure strong communication and ultimate success between the TMW Center and these individuals and groups.
  • Helps identify additional childcare providers or organizations that could serve as future research partners. 
  • Serves as an ambassador of the TMW Center’s mission and resources to partners, families/caregivers, and the public.

Project Support:

  • Provides technical, administrative and logistical support to the Connecticut early childhood research project team.
  • Participates in meetings and planning sessions with TMW staff to share implementation observations and provide updates to inform program and process improvement. 

Other Responsibilities:

  • Maintains technical and administrative support for a research project.
  • Installs, sets up and performs experiments; interacting with students and other laboratory staff under the direction of the principal investigator.
  • Maintains recruiting and scheduling research subjects; assisting with developing or amending study protocols; assisting with developing data collection tools; assisting with building databases; and providing general administrative support. Has general awareness in research techniques or methods, regulatory policies and procedures, and relevant scientific field.
  • Performs other related work as needed

Fall 2023 new graduate course

Sentence and Discourse Processing (PSYC 5583)  

  

Fall, 2023 (timeslot to be determined) 

  

Instructor:  Whitney Tabor (whitney.tabor@uconn.edu 

  

This course provides an introduction to psycho- and computational linguistics at the sentence and discourse levels.   It includes a theoretically-grounded exploration of Deep Learning/Large Language Models (LLMs), linking these to psycholinguistic work on phenomena at the boundary of competence and performance.  The course focuses on a number of structural/semantic phenomena of interest, selected from  case-marking, agreement,  long-distance dependencies, recursion, event-structure, and semantic/pragmatic factors in islandhood among others.  It considers cases where some researchers have argued that competence and performance phenomena are linked, and it asks what implications these phenomena have for the theory of language. 

 

The course will be offered in Fall, 2023.  It is currently listed in the time schedule as occurring on Mondays from 1:30-4:30 but this timeframe will almost certainly change once it becomes clear who plans to take the course.  If you are interested, please send email to whitney.tabor@uconn.edu. 

Save the Date: IBACS Meet & Speak on 4/28

We are asking you to save the date for the 2023 IBACS Meet & Speak event on Friday, April 28th from 9-4:30pm. This exciting event will be in-person in Konover Auditorium. 

 

Affiliated faculty will give 10-minute talks, most of which are on the research they have carried out, or propose carrying out, with seed funding awarded by IBACS. Affiliated graduate students who have received IBACS funding will present 5-minute “datablitz” style talks. 

 

The event will provide an opportunity to learn more about the diverse interdisciplinary research of IBACS affiliates, provide a forum for cross-disciplinary networking, and will introduce our refurbished EEG Lab and our new UConn Science Alliance Mobile (SAM)! 

 

Schedule 

9:15AM – Welcome

9:30AM – Panel Discussion

10:15AM – Faculty Talks

11:25AM – Graduate Student Data Blitz

12:00PM – Lunch 

1:00PM – Keynote Speaker: Dr. Diego Bohorquez, Duke University

2:30PM to 4:30PM – Tours of the UConn Science Alliance Mobile (UConn SAM) and EEG Lab

 

A more detailed program including speaker names, talk titles, and the focus of the panel discussion will be shared soon. 

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LangFest 2023 – Save the Date!

We are excited to announce that Language Fest is making an in-person return for 2023, and invite you to join us on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 26th (event times TBD).

 

Language Fest is a University-wide research conference that welcomes the full cross-disciplinary community of language researchers at UConn for a day of sharing results, ideas, methodologies, and fostering future interdisciplinary collaborations. Researchers from all disciplines of the language sciences and at all career stages are welcome and encouraged to submit their work.  

 

Further details about submissions and registration will be provided in early-March 2023.

 

For any questions about Language Fest, please e-mail: langfest@uconn.edu and visit our website https://languagefest.uconn.edu/

  

We look forward to your attendance and participation!

COGS Colloquium: Dr. Naselaris on 2/24

The Cognitive Science Program invites you to a talk on 2/24!

Speaker: Dr. Thomas Naselaris, an Associate Professor from Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota.

Time & Location: 4PM, Friday February 24th, 2023, in Oak Hall Room 117. Light refreshments will be provided. 

RSVP Form 

Talk Title: “Why Do We Have Mental Images?”

 

AbstractEveryone who experiences mental imagery is the world expert on the contents of their own mental images. We argue that this privileged perspective on one’s own mental images provides very limited understanding about the function of mental imagery, which can only be understood by proposing and testing hypotheses about the computational work that mental images do. We propose that mental imagery functions as a useful form of inference that is conditioned on visual beliefs. We implement this form of inference in a simple generative model of natural scenes, and show that it makes testable predictions about differences in tuning to seen and imagined features. We confirm these predictions with a large-scale fMRI experiment in which human brain activity was sampled while subjects generated hundreds of mental images. We speculate that ongoing mental imagery may impact the structure of noise correlations in the visual system, and present a preliminary analysis of the Natural Scenes Dataset that appears to be consistent with these speculations. 

Bio: Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the Medical Discovery Team on Optical Imaging and Brain Science at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research. He is co-founder and currently Executive Chair of the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience.

UConn Sophomore Launches Brand Focused on Mental Health

“’Small wins’ feature in a big way in Davenport’s first venture and in StarMind’s initial product, The Guide – an interactive journal that combines daily logs, “morning mindfulness” activities, and areas for reflection with key psychology concepts and curated online content accessible through QR codes imbedded into an American-made navy leather-bound tome.”

View the article Here

COGS Alum Pavitra Makarla ’21 and Undergraduate Research

“’I think a lot of students are worried about whether it’s too late or too early to get involved,’ she says. ‘I think that people shouldn’t be afraid to dive in if they’re really interested, because we’re a research university, and UConn has a lot of opportunities if you’re willing to seek them out.'”

For Undergraduates, Early Research Experience Pays Off

COGS Alum Emily Kaufman ’16 Stands Up to Online Hate

A proud Husky alumna, Kaufman works as an investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. A leading authority on hate, extremism, antisemitism and terrorism, the center’s researchers, including Kaufman, monitor the online presence of groups and organizations in order to expose and disrupt them, to educate law enforcement about the workings and actions of the groups, and to help the public identify and deal with extremist threats.”

The Extremist Watchdog: Meet the Husky Who Tracks Online Hate

COGS Major Irene Soteriou ’23 Named A Truman Scholar

Truman Scholars demonstrate outstanding leadership potential, a commitment to a career in government or the nonprofit sector, and academic excellence. Each Truman Scholar receives funding for graduate studies, leadership training, career counseling, and special internship and fellowship opportunities within the federal government.”

UConn Junior named A Truman Scholar 

COGS Major Connor Rickermann ’23 Partners with Bike Walk Bolton

“The positive experience also led to a second partnership with Bike Walk Bolton, UConn Service Learning, and Anthropology 3340 – rising senior Connor Rickermann ’23 (ENG/CLAS), a dual degree computer science engineering and cognitive sciences major, worked with the group on an economic impact project, helping to collect data on how people use the Hop River Trail, what users like and dislike about the trail, what amenities and commodities exist along the trail, and how awareness can be heightened to the benefit of both trail users and local businesses.”

For Popular Trail, There’s Light at the End- and the Beginning, and the Middle- of the Tunnel