Join our Lab!
Motivated and curious mentees wanted!
Our work is highly interdisciplinary, so we welcome mentees with a variety of academic and professional backgrounds, including communication disorders and sciences, psychology, linguistics, and computer science.
Tasks include audio transcription, scoring of responses, experiment design, data collection, statistical analysis, data mining, and network analysis. Coding experience is not required, but preferred for some projects (preference for R and Python).
Undergraduate and MA Mentees: In addition to the tasks above, mentees will also learn about research at a bigger picture level. We will focus on fundamentals of good research, communicating research to the public, work/life balance, and professional development skills. Mentees are expected to commit 5-10 hours a week on lab duties, with some flexibility possible in day/time/location of work.
Most mentees volunteer or receive course credit for their participation in the lab. Occasionally, funding for mentees may be available through grants or work-study.
Interested students are encouraged to email Dr. Castro with a brief statement of their goals related to participating in a research lab and their general availability.
PhD Mentees: PhD programs take a significant amount of time and work for both the mentee and the mentor, which must be balanced with life and personal well-being. For this reason, there must be a good fit for both the PhD mentee and Dr. Castro, in terms of topic area and dynamics. Check out our Research to see if your interests align. Learn more about our PhD program in the Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences.
Funding is available through a Research/Teaching Assistantship in the Department.
Interested students are encouraged to email Dr. Castro to discuss a potential PhD application well before submitting an application to UB.
Current ongoing projects include:
the role of semantic and phonological neighbors on word retrieval
longitudinal trajectories of verbal fluency
stimuli selection for assessment and treatment of anomia
Post-doctoral Mentees: In our view, a postdoctoral position is a time to learn a new skill or delve deeper into a topic area that will further your research interests and prepare you for the next stage of your career. Our research program has two complementary arms: one focused on basic science cognitive modeling and experimentation to understand fundamental word retrieval processes and one focused on translation of our basic science research into clinical practice. Current PhD students who want to learn more in one of these arms, but have experience in the other arm, are particularly encouraged to discuss a postdoctoral position with Dr. Castro.
While funding through the research lab is not currently available, Dr. Castro is very supportive of working together to write and submit a postdoctoral grant (e.g., NIH NRSA F32 or NSF SPRF). PhD candidates should reach out 1-2 years prior to expected PhD completion date so that there is time to carefully conceptualize, write, and submit the grant (and revise if necessary).