The College of Liberal Arts’ student body is driven by curiosity and questioning. We encourage all our students to participate in research and help create knowledge. The College of Liberal Arts offers funding opportunities each semester, including summer, to afford students to undertake critical and impactful work. Our Liberal Arts Undergraduate Research Awards (LAURAs) are College funded awards with bi-annual calls for proposals.

The Liberal Arts Undergraduate Research Awards (LAURAs). The LAURAs grant $2,000 each to undergraduate student-faculty member duos to conduct a research project over the course of a semester. Each student earns a $15/hour stipend from the grant while spending 100 hours on the project, which enables students to dedicate their time to developing research skills without having to worry about their financial wellbeing.

The Liberal Arts Undergraduate Research Awards (LAURA) creates more opportunities for undergraduate students to develop research skills by working with faculty mentors on faculty-led research projects while increasing support for faculty research in the College of Liberal Arts. 

• LAURA Scholars Awards Ceremony

LAURA Scholars Teams Share Experiences

Student-faculty teams worked together over the course of a semester or summer on a research project of mutual interest. Visit our LAURA Scholars Testimonials page and watch the videos to see some of the experiences from our faculty and students! 

Faculty and Student Research Teams

The College of Liberal Arts is pleased to announce the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 LAURA Scholar Awards:

Fall 2022

• Deborah Drabick (Psychology) and student Georgia Moon for Neuropsychological and peer predictors of Coping Power intervention outcomes
• Orfeo Fioretos (Political Science) and student Lauren Ross for The United States and the Politics of Multilateralism Since the End of the Cold War
• Kevin Henry (Geography and Urban Studies) and student Jacob Downey for Socioeconomic Disparities in Female Breast  Cancer Stage at Diagnosis: Revisiting Neighborhood Poverty using Residential Histories     
• Jeremy Mennis (Geography and Urban Studies) and student Kai Yuen for Digitizing Historical Maps of Chesapeake Bay’s Eastern Shore to Support the Geographic Analysis of the Underground Railroad
• Vishnu Murty (Psychology) and student Bailey Spangler for Memory fragmentation during threat-drive naturalistic events
• Nora Newcombe (Psychology ) and student John Erardi for Development of Naturalistic Event Memory
• Lauren Olsen (Sociology) and student Meghan Gongalla for Curricular Opportunities and Constraints: Reproducing Privilege and Inequality in U.S. Medical Education
• Ingrid Olson (Psychology) and student Obinnaya Onwukanjo for Event Segmentation and Remembering Natural Events
• Aunshul Rege (Criminal Justice) and student Parker Naugle for Disinformation, Cyberwar, and Critical Infrastructure Security 
• Mónica Ricketts (History) and student Ignacio A. Vasconsellos Riva for Hunger and Famines in Bourbon Proyectista Writings
• David Smith (Psychology) and student Ishika Kohli for Age-Related Differences in Social and Economic Reward Processing
• Kimberly Williams (Anthropology) and student Asher Quentin Riley for Corinth Bioarchaeological Digital Database Development

Spring 2023

• Nilgun Anadolu-Okur (Africology and African American Studies) and student Julia Sarah Chein for Freedom on My Mind: A Photographic Journey Mapping Philadelphia’s Contribution to Arts, Culture and Freedom 
• James D. Bachmeier (Sociology) and student Amira Solomon for Childhood School Contexts and the Integration of the Children of Immigrants in 20th Century America
• Lisa A. Briand (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student William Cuadrado for Effect of adolescent social isolation on cocaine reinstatement using a lever press procedure
• Eunice Y. Chen (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Mahanoor Rafi for Correlates of sedentary behavior in emerging adulthood
• Tania Giovannetti (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Marina  Kaplan for Using Smartwatches to Assess and Improve Cognition in Older Adults 
• Cristina Gragnani (French, German, Italian and Slavic) and student Alexandra Glyptis for Gender Violence, Loathing, and Self-Affirmation Through Narration: Anna Franchi’s Avanti il Divorzio (1902)
• Elizabeth Gunderson (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Sherese Bennett for The Impact of Spatial Book-Reading on Preschoolers’ Mental Rotation Skills
• Chelsea Helion (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Tiara Bounyarith for Decision-making under uncertainty
• Veronica Jacome (Geography and Urban Studies) and student Mina Schneck for Power, Responsibility and Reliability in the Electrical World: The Case of Rural Pennsylvania  
• Artemy M. Kalinovsky (History) and student Ian Francis Henry for Funding a Dam: Tajikistan’s Eurobond and the Financing of Development 
• Karen E. Klaiber Hersch (Greek and Roman Classics) and student (Indy) Harrison Kyle Calig for Tanaquil Rex
• Michael Mccloskey (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Jules Mirales for Association between trauma and aggression
• Laura McGrath (English) and student Tiffany Li for The Literary Agent and American Literature
• Alan McPherson (History) and student Jessica Homan for The Impact of Iran-Contra on US Democracy
• Vishnu P. Murty (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Christopher Papazian for Characterizing agency-related remediations in memory distortions for aversive events
• Nora Newcombe (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Kara Storjohann for Home Sweet Home: Relations between episodic and semantic memory in childhood
• Lauren Olsen (Sociology) and student Caitlin Tickman for Examining Opportunities and Barriers to Underrepresented Student Advancement Along the Premedical Track
• Ingrid Olson (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Asha Mir-Young for Modes of Spatial Navigation: Comparing Virtual and Real-world Encoding
• Vinay Parikh (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Aryan D. Patel for Isolation of Neural-Derived Exosomes from Blood as Biomarkers for Brain Cholinergic Signatures
• Mónica Ricketts (History) and student Ximena Alatorre Terrazas for Women in the Theater: Actresses, Managers, and Public Speakers (Lima, 1821- 1850)
• Christina Rosan (Geography and Urban Studies) and student Julianna Roseo for PREACT: Planning for Equity and Resilience Through Accessible Community Technology 
• David V.  Smith (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Cooper J. Sharp for The Signal and the Noise: Teasing Apart Cerebellar Responses to Decision-Making Tasks
• Will Vincent (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Sirina E. Tiwari for Is Anxiety Associated with Conspiracy Beliefs About HIV and COVID-19 Among People Disproportionately Affected by HIV?
• Jeffrey T.  Ward (Criminal Justice) and student Sabina Pawlowska-Kawiiso for Consequences of Procedural Justice for Individual Well-being Among Justice-Involved Youth
• Robert W. Weisberg (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Marah Dormuth for REMOTE ASSOCIATES AND CREATIVE THINKING
• Kimberly D. Williams (Anthropology) and student Asher Quentin Riley for Corinth Bioarchaeological Continued Digital Database Development and Analysis
• Mathieu E. Wimmer (Psychology and Neuroscience) and student Chethan Reddy for Delineating the neural pathways underlying cognitive deficits caused by chronic opioid consumption in male and female Long Evans Rats
• Steven Windisch (Criminal Justice) and student Rosalee Banks for Nefarious Net-Nazis: Analyzing the Social Function of White Supremacist Humor
• Matt Wray (Sociology) and student Julia Budlow for Whiteness & Eugenics in American Literature & Thought, 1880-1960
• Janire Zalbidea (Spanish and Portuguese) and student Levi Weber for Understanding Bilingual Writing Development in College-Level Spanish Classes