Current Course-based Research Offerings

Spring 2024 CURE Offerings

Talk to your advisor today about enrolling in one of these CUREs for Spring 2024!

*Some courses may require you to complete an application or email the instructor to enroll. See information for each course below.

Interested in Vertically Integrated Projects? Visit their webpage to apply: https://uavip.arizona.edu/ 

Check this page regularly - we update it as classes are added or changed. A complete list of CUREs developed at the University of Arizona can be found here.

Questions about CUREs? Email UndergradResearch@arizona.edu!

 

AFAS299 - Community Responsive Digital Humanities Research

  • Instructor: Dr. Bryan Carter (bryancarter@arizona.edu)
  • Schedule: In-person, two 7.5-week sessions.  Students may sign up for both to complete the project in a single semester.
  • Credits: 1-3
  • 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. 
  • No prerequisites
  • Students interested in enrolling should email Dr. Bryan Carter at bryancarter@arizona.edu.

ANTH211 - Biosocial Interpretations of Reproduction

  • Instructor: Dr. Janelle Lamoreaux (jlamoreaux@arizona.edu) 
  • Schedule: TBA
  • Credits: 3
  • Description coming soon

APCV361 - Data Analysis and Visualization

  • Instructor: Dr. Li Xu (lxu@arizona.edu)
  • Schedule: Asynchronous online with optional weekly meetings (day/time TBD)
  • Credits: 3
  • This course 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.
  • Prerequisites: APCV 302 and APCV 320, CAST student. Prior Python programming experience is required. Must be a CAST student.

ENVS270L - Critical Zone Science Lab

HNRS314 - Ideas into Action: An Introduction to Civic Engagement

  • Instructor: Dr. Caitlyn Hall (cahall@arizona.edu)
  • Credits: 1-3
  • Schedule: TBA
  • Description: 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. 
  • No prerequisites

LING2/3/499 - Community-led Language Technology Development

  • Instructor: Dr. Amy Fountain (avf@arizona.edu) 
  • Credits: 1-3
  • Asynchronous online
  • 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, at a course level (299, 399, 499) appropriate to their experience, 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
  • No prerequisites
  • Students interested in enrolling should email Dr. Amy Fountain at avf@arizona.edu.

MCB195 - Title TBA

MUS4/529 - Music, Health and Wellness Story Lab

  • Instructor: Dr.  Jennie Gubner (jgubner@arizona.edu)
  • Credits: 
  • Schedule: TBA
  • Description: This course has a community-engagement designation and is also a CURE in that students will be helping build stories for a Story Lab Website through the Center for Digital Humanities.

NSC395B - Participation in the integrated stress response pathway research techniques 

  • Instructors: Dr. Jen Teske (tesekja@arizona.edu) and Dr. Jennifer Ravia (jravia@arizona.edu)
  • Credits: 3
  • Section #: 005

    Schedule: Wednesdays 1-3:50pm in Shantz building room 

  • Description: The integrated stress response (IRS) is a ubiquitous cellular pathway that regulates protein synthesis and is associated with many chronic diseases. Animal models indicate that abnormal behavior (diet, physical activity and sleep) disrupts regulatory proteins in the IRS within several tissues, but it’s unclear if the same response occurs in humans and if the proteins can be detected in a biofluid (saliva or urine). The purpose of this class is to determine if IRS proteins can be detected in biofluids and if they are associated with diet quality, physical activity levels, and sleep. To do this, students will participate in data collection, protein extraction and quantification, lab assays, data visualization, data analysis and create a poster to summarize the data collected during the project. This is an entry level class, where class time and outside activities will be used to introduce and discuss these activities sufficiently to develop student self-efficacy with laboratory procedures. At the end of the course, students will be able to describe a research project from start to finish and effectively communicate the results of the research. 
  • No prerequisites

NSCS397 - VP-CURE: Brain Communication Networks

  • Instructor: Dr. Martha Bhattacharya (marthab1@arizona.edu)
  • Credits: 3
  • Schedule: TBA
  • Description: 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. More information can be found here.
  • Prerequisites: MC181L, MCB181R, ECOL182L, and ECOL182R. Concurrent enrollment or equivalent AP credit are acceptable.

PLS299 - Applied Plant Genetics Lab

POL297B - The Origins of Data in Politics and Policy

  • Instructor: Dr. David Dow (ddow@arizona.edu)
  • Credits: 3 
  • Schedule: TBA
  • Description: 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.
  • No prerequisites

SOC/CHS403 - Care, Health, and Society (CHS) in the Wild: Conducting Ethnographic Studies of Health and Medicine in Action

  • Instructor: Dr. Daniel Menchik (mench@arizona.edu)
  • Credits: 3 
  • Schedule: Fully online
  • Description: 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 on a weekly basis, and produce a presentation and final report based on your ethnographies.
  • Health and Society (CHS303) is a recommended course but not a prerequisite.

RELI406 - Religious Diversity in Healthcare: Intercultural Training

  • Instructor: Dr. Kristy Slominski (slominski@arizona.edu)
  • Credits: 3 
  • Schedule: In person Tues. 9:30-10:45am, the rest online!
  • Description: This course is designed to offer tools for understanding religious and cultural diversity within healthcare settings, which includes consideration of religious patients, religious healthcare workers, faith-based healthcare institutions, and the impact of religious communities on healthcare laws and services. To develop skills for navigating intercultural differences, students will practice applying academic approaches to religion to health-related case studies
  • No prerequisites