Understanding the Student Experience
In our lab, we take very seriously our mandate to not only produce excellent research but also to train excellent future researchers. We believe it is important to do this at all levels. In mentoring both undergraduate and graduate students’ research, Dr. Pascual-Leone actively promotes a culture of research. He does this through regular research group meetings (every 1-2 weeks) in which members at all levels (undergrad, MA, PhD, and professor) rotate in presenting their work at its various stages of development. Students are coached in preparing and delivering their presentations and there is rich feedback in the discussions of their work that follow. These meetings are often used as practice runs for class presentations, thesis proposals or defenses, and conference presentations.
Research projects in our lab are often vertically integrated such that undergraduates get training in data collection from the professor as well as from graduate students and their data sets are sometimes subsets of the graduate student’s data, who in turn are supervised in mentoring. Many of the projects under Dr. Pascual-Leone's supervision use overlapping variables to facilitate collaborative efforts among students.
One of the advantages to dovetailing new student projects with existing and emerging topics of research is that it helps ensure students have access to one another as supporting staff (raters, codes, helpers in data collection, etc). In short, this approach facilitates respect and collaboration among student researchers. Moreover, this support and structure allows students to often assume the responsibility for executing larger projects that are well placed on the frontier of our field of research.
Overall, regular research meetings and presentations allow students to see the continuity of projects they have been involved with.
Facilities
The lab is located in CHS on the second floor in room 262. The facilities include a meeting room with a whiteboard and a projection screen used for presentations.
The lab space consists also of two working rooms with computers, a printer, etc. Come by and have a cup of tea!