Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs)

CUREs are courses specifically designed for first-year, second-year, or transfer students looking to gain an authentic research experience right away.  Many CURE classes have no prerequisites!  CUREs take a research question based on a faculty member's field of study  that requires many people to complete the data collection and analysis.  Students in a CURE class participate in this project, helping to move novel research questions forward and advance our understanding in that field. CUREs look great on a resume. They can help students determine if a particular research field is right for them. The skills developed in a CURE class can also establish the necessary relationships and trajectory to be competitive for future research opportunities.  

New CUREs are being developed, so check back regularly to see new options! CUREs that have already been created are listed below. See our current offerings page to see which CUREs are running now.

AFAS299 (HUM) - Community Responsive Digital Humanities Research

  • Instructors: Dr. Bryan Carter and Lynn Robinson, MA, College of Humanities

  • Students will join in a theoretical and hands-on practical introduction to the Digital Humanities and advanced technologies used in the field (augmented reality, virtual reality, volumetric, 360 imaging, etc.). This knowledge will be applied in a real-world project with a local cultural center as students collaborate to explore how to undertake critical, embedded Digital Humanities partnerships in community settings with vulnerable populations.

APCV361 (CAST) - Data Analysis and Visualization

  • Instructor: Dr. Li Xu, College of Applied Science and Technology

  • APCV 361 Data Analysis and Visualization will lay a foundation for students to understand how to process, analyze, and visualize data.  Topics include data collection and integration, exploratory data analysis, statistical inference and modeling, machine learning, and data visualization.  The emphasis of the course topics will be placed on integration and synthesis of concepts and their application to solving problems.  Students will explore these topics using software tools.

BAT102 (CALS/ENGR) - Data Science Heroes: An undergraduate research experience in Open Data Science Practices

  • CURE Team: Dr. Bonnie Hurwitz and Dr. Alise Ponsero, College of Engineering
  • Despite a growing demand for data scientists, university training in science ethics, code licensing and best reproducibility practices are not generalized for undergraduates. In this CURE, students will conduct an assessment of the current landscape and the evolution of accessibility, documentation and reproducibility practices in bioinformatics. The CURE will be a two-credit course in the Department of Biosystems Engineering accessible to students from any college. In this CURE, students will learn and reflect upon best practices for open science and science reproducibility. Several practical skills will also be developed such as science communication, as well as the use of computational tools for code versioning and documentation.

CALS297E (CALS) - Discovering Biodiversity

  • CURE Team: Dr. Wendy Moore and Raine Ikagawa, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences 
  • The Sonoran Desert Region is home to more species of native bees than any other region of the world. In this course our main research goal will be focused on discovering and documenting the diversity of Tucson's native bees. This course provides an introductory research experience that immerses students in the process of discovering, describing, and classifying biodiversity. They explore biodiversity research using cutting edge laboratory, field, museum (curatorial), and bioinformatics techniques. The data they collect will be published and shared freely with both the scientific community and the general public.
  • Course prerequisites: MCB 181 R&L, ECOL 182 R&L

GEOS275 (CALS) - Dendochronology

  • Instructors: Dr. Valerie Trouet and Dr. Bryan Black, College of Science

  • Geological evidence indicates that a massive earthquake or series of earthquakes occurred about 1,100 years ago under what is now Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia, WA. By applying dendrochronology dating techniques on earthquake-killed trees killed, BA Black’s lab recently showed that two separate faults ruptured simultaneously in the year 923 AD, causing the region’s largest earthquake in at least the last 16,000 years. The magnitude 7.8 earthquake was comparable to the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, or the recent earthquake that devastated Syria and Turkey. However, two additional faults in the area may also have been involved in this massive 923 AD earthquake. In this class, we will use dendrochronological techniques to attempt to date trees killed along these two other faults to determine whether they, too, died in the year 923. In so doing, we will test whether the single earthquake was even larger than we now know, or whether there was a rapid series of earthquakes over months to decades. This information will be used by geologists to better understand linkages among faults and to inform seismic risk and associated building codes in western Washington state.

HNRS314 - Ideas into Action: An Introduction to Civic Engagement

  • Instructor: Dr. Caitlyn Hall

  • This is a dynamic service-learning course where students investigate notions of community and civic engagement through the lens of a social scientist, community members, and non-profit leaders. Students are asked to engage in service-learning pedagogy with real-world practice in this hands-on experiential learning class. Students will spend time understanding systematic social issues and structured inequalities with a non-profit community partner. Students will work on an interdisciplinary Honors Civic Engagement Team (HCET) to address and respond to social issues impacting marginalized communities. Students should expect to spend about 45 hours on community-based projects that the host organization often would be unable to complete with their own resources. Students will spend time unveiling their personal values and identities to better understand solutions to social issues plaguing society including racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of bias through reflections, readings, discussions and academic inquiry. Students will develop an understanding of their long-term social responsibility in responding to community-based social issues through the lenses of a social scientist, a non-profit leader, and a community member.

LING299 - Community-led Language Technology Development

  • Instructor: Dr. Amy Fountain 

  • Description: Students will join a community-based language technology development project, the Coeur d’Alene Online Language Resource Center (COLRC), as an example of a community lead language technology development project that focuses on the needs of a low-resource, minoritized language community. Depending on their skills and interests, participating students will enroll for 1 to 3 credits, and be assigned to assist in the development and deployment process. The project supports students who wish to develop skills in linguistic analysis and language activism, along with at least one of the following technical skills: coding for frontend, backend, rest interfaces, and scripting (javascript, python); database development (postgres, graphQL); and/or natural language processing (ingest, tokenization, annotation tasks using lum.ai/odinson libraries). Interested students should have at least some familiarity with and enjoyment of coding, but need not have significant experience or expertise in these areas. Students who are members of minoritized or low resource language communities will bring particularly valuable experience and expertise to this work, but any undergraduate student is welcome to participate.

MCB195

  • Instructors: Dr. Frans Tax and Dr. Susan Hester

  • Description: Coming Soon

MUS496S - Music, Health, and Wellness Story Lab

  • Instructor: Dr. Jennie Gubner 
  • Description: How can music promote health and wellness in our lives and communities across the lifespan? For years, ethnomusicologists have been studying music around the world as a form of healing and a vehicle for community building and identity formation. One of the most important ways ethnomusicologists do research is by learning directly with and from individuals and communities through interviews, observant participation, and thoughtful engagement in communities of practice. In this interdisciplinary, hands-on, fieldwork course, we will explore the relationship between music and health through the creation of collaborative, community-based digital storytelling projects. Working in teams, students in this course will meet with individuals from diverse backgrounds from across the Tucson area to learn about their musical preferences and practices, document their musical life stories, and work to map the musical spaces and activities that have brought and continue to bring meaning, wellness, and health to their lives. To raise awareness about how music can be used to build and strengthen healthy communities, the stories students gather will be collected and shared as a growing creative toolkit to be shared with community members and healthcare providers. 

NSC395B (CALS) - Participation in the integrated stress response pathway research techniques

  • Instructor: Dr. Janet Nicol, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
  • This is a hands-on course that provides students with an authentic research experience. The class works together with the instructor on a novel research project involving humor and well-being.

NROS 397 ( COS) VIP-CURE: Brain Communication Networks

  • Instructors: Dr. Ulises Ricoy and Dr. Martha Bhattacharya, College of Science

  • Our objective in this VIP-CURE is to predict and test candidate brain proteins participating in neuron-glia communication and neurodegenerative disease. Students will learn computational approaches for “big data” analysis to generate a list of gene candidates, followed by the evaluation of these candidates in Drosophila (fruit flies) with learning and memory or locomotor behavioral readouts. Students will gain real research experience using hand-on techniques and will contribute to new knowledge about the way neurons and glia communicate in health and disease. 

POL 297B (SOC)-The Origins of Data in Politics and Policy

  • CURE Team: Dr. Frank Gonzalez and Dr. Jessica Braithwaite, College of Social and Behavioral Science
  • This course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) will introduce students to the main ways in which scholars and other experts in the fields of political science and public policy obtain and analyze data relevant to politics and policy in variety of contexts across the world. Beyond discussing the origins of data analyzed in our fields of study, we will also spend time collecting and working directly with our own original data to better understand both where data come from and how they are used in academic research. Students will work in teams on ongoing research projects supervised by the instructor and SGPP faculty. Students are given the opportunity to choose from a menu of projects based on their interests. Projects in previous semesters have focused on a variety of topics including political psychology, armed conflict, and migration. The course will involve three hours per week of class-based training and lecturing alongside six hours per week of students working in teams tackling specific research tasks on their selected projects. Finally, we will also discuss and practice how to effectively present data and research findings for non-academic audiences.

PSY197E (COS)-Engaging in Psychology Research

  • Instructor: Dr. Janet Nicol, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
  • This is a hands-on course that provides students with an authentic research experience. The class works together with the instructor on a novel research project involving humor and well-being.

RNR297A - Natural Resources Workshop

  • Instructors: Dr. Rachel Gallery
  • Description: Coming Soon

SOC 403 (SBS)-CHS In the Wild: Conducting Ethnographic Studies of Health and Medicine in Action

  • Instructors: Dr. Daniel Menchik and Dr. Franziska Frank, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences

  • This course is an introduction to methods and practices of studying how we moderns organize health care. The aim is to ground you in the foundational ethnographic literature in these areas, focusing on the relationships between theory and data, and between researcher and researched. Because this course is a CURE (Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience), this aim will be met in the context of your ventures into field sites where you will be expected to make sense of the methods, often messy and accidental, that organize everyday practices intended to produce health. The course covers the essentials of research: data access and gathering (i.e. interviewing and observation), data analysis, reliability, and writing. When we do field work, we make a number of ethical decisions, so you will learn and apply principles of ethical review, such as informed consent and granting anonymity of interviewed participants (among other things, by attaining training on research with human subjects (CITI). These essentials will be covered as you conduct original field research, share and critique each other's field notes ona weekly basis, and produce a presentation and final report based on your ethnographies.

  • Health and Society (CHS 303) is a recommended course but not a prerequisite.

TLS299 - Introduction to Education Research Methods: STEM Education, College Access, & Equity

  • Instructor:  Dr. Cory Knox, College of Education
  • In this 2-credit course for all majors, students learn about social science and apply research methods to design and conduct a group research project. Students design and implement surveys and interviews to investigate students' experiences and views of college access, inclusion, and equity.