Faculty & research

Labs with undergrads in them

At a lot of universities, research is something that happens to graduate students. Caldwell's labs take undergraduate research assistants on purpose — second-years included — because fresh eyes ask the questions everyone else stopped noticing.

Three of many

The people you'd actually learn from

A sample, not a directory — one lab from each corner of the faculty, chosen because undergraduates do real work in all three.

School of Health Professions

Connected Care Lab

Dr. Amara Osei

Associate Professor, Health Informatics

Research focus: Patient-portal design for older adults

Dr. Osei's lab studies why patients over 70 abandon health portals — and redesigns the portals instead of blaming the patients. Her team's plain-language results screens are being piloted across the regional health network, and undergraduate research assistants have co-authored four of the lab's last six papers.

“If a 78-year-old can't find her test results, that's not her failure. It's a design decision someone made — and design decisions can be unmade.”

School of Computing & Technology

Resilient Systems Group

Dr. Theo Lindqvist

Professor, Software Engineering

Research focus: Why software fails — and how to build systems that degrade gracefully

The Resilient Systems Group dissects real-world outages the way crash investigators study aviation — then turns the findings into engineering practice. Dr. Lindqvist's failure-analysis seminar fills within hours of registration opening, and the group hires second-year students as research assistants on purpose: 'fresh eyes find the embarrassing bugs.'

“Every system fails. The question we teach is whether it fails loudly, safely, and early — or quietly, catastrophically, and at 3 a.m.”

Caldwell School of Business

Small Business Finance Project

Dr. Priya Raman

Assistant Professor, Caldwell School of Business

Research focus: How lending decisions shape which small businesses survive

Dr. Raman follows hundreds of Arden Falls small businesses through their credit histories to understand why nearly identical firms get different answers from lenders. Her findings feed directly back into the Small Business Studio curriculum — and into a plain-language loan-readiness guide the studio gives every client, free.

“The data kept showing that the difference between a thriving business and a closed one was often a single loan officer's Tuesday. That should bother us — and it's fixable.”

Research with undergrads in it

Not a spectator sport

60+
paid undergraduate research assistantships across the faculty each year: 11
papers with undergraduate co-authors from these three labs since 2023: 2nd year
the earliest students join a lab — the Resilient Systems Group recruits there on purpose

Illustrative figures — this is a sample site.

Work like this starts with a program

Every lab on this page recruits from the programs down the hall. Find yours, or ask us which one leads where you want to go.

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