VT EPSCoR Summer Research Internship

Vermont EPSCoR is offering summer research internship opportunities for our cutting-edge NSF-funded project, Harnessing the Data Revolution for Vermont: The Science of Online Corpora, Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS). This five-year, interdisciplinary initiative aims to better understand and harness the power of stories which are essential tools for how people comprehend, explain, predict, and navigate the world. SOCKS advances the Digital Humanities by creating innovative methods to quantify individual stories and their ecosystems using data collection, natural language processing, and large language models.
The VT ESPCoR SOCKS Summer Research Internship program allows students to engage in research associated with the NSF EPSCoR award. The interns are paired with research teams working within the transdisciplinary SOCKS program. At the end of the internship, the teams come together for a symposium to share their findings through oral presentations and written reports. Students can expect a full-time, high-impact, hands-on research experience for 10 weeks in one of the following areas:

• Indigenous Narratives and Storytelling in Global Environmental Governance
• Data Ethics, Privacy and Belief Propagation
• Migration Narratives and Social Media Discourse – how they shape our understanding of climate change-driven migration
• Analysis of local news stories and programs
• Understanding and Promoting Human Connection in Serious Illness
• Language Analysis of Trauma Survivors’ Narratives

Primary Faculty Mentors:
Richard Watts, Director of the Center for Research on Vermont
Kemi Fuentes-George, Associate Professor of Political Science, Middlebury College
Juniper Lovato, Research Assistant Professor, Computer Science, University of Vermont [website]
Alice Patania, Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont
Pablo Bose, Professor of Geography and Geosciences, University of Vermont
Matthew Price, Professor of Psychological Science, University of Vermont
Bob Gramling Professor in the Department of Family Medicine, University of Vermont

The Vermont EPSCoR’s SOCKS research team is currently recruiting 14 undergraduate students for an exciting ten-week, paid internship opportunity based at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington, VT. The internship begins on May 26, 2025 and ends on August 1, 2025.