Undergraduate Student Program

Apply here and email us at carlanguagelab@chop.edu

Student Trainees in Autism Research (STAR)

Internship at the Social Attention and Language Lab (SoAL)

This is an in-person internship. We ask that students commit to 10+ hours of work per week during the school year, and 30-40 hours of work per week during the summer. These hours can be flexible within our regular hours of 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM. Interns will work on a variety of tasks in the SoAL lab (PI: Dr. Julia Parish-Morris) to help with different projects, as well as engage in career development activities, attend talks at CHOP and UPenn, collaborate with like-minded peers, and gain resume-building experience. Internship tasks include:

· Coding data for various projects using Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS) behavioral data

o Students will be trained to use ELAN, a software that SoAL uses to code data. Students will listen to audio clips or watch videos of caregivers and clinicians interacting with infants to segment out sounds, label sounds as speech, non-speech, or vegetative, annotate non-speech sounds as having positive or negative affect, and transcribe adult speech.

· Transcribing natural language samples from a variety of SoAL studies and collaborations.

o Students will be trained to use Webtrans, SoAL’s transcription webserver created in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s Linguistic Data Consortium.

o Students will transcribe unstructured interviews and conversations between speakers (e.g., clinical research assistants, clinical psychologists, parents, peers) and autistic or non-autistic individuals across a wide age range.

· Data entry for a variety of studies

o Students will enter data from run-sheets and questionnaires collected during in-person visits into REDCap.

· Shadowing in-person visits for the Sex and Gender in Autism (SAGA) study

o Students will have the opportunity to shadow in-person study visits. Study visits include a variety of research tasks (eye-tracking, friendship qualities questionnaire, parent-child interaction) as well as clinical tasks (language test, IQ test, autism assessment).

· For summer students only: Attend special student events, including career development and networking opportunities

o Students will have the opportunity to hear from Center for Autism Research alumni about their career journeys, tour the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, attend talks at CHOP and UPenn, meet with the lab’s Principal Investigator, Dr. Julia Parish-Morris, and complete an independent research project.