ARIA Internship Spotlight

ARIA Spotlight: Joyce Gerges – Department of Psychology

Joyce Gerges — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 15:00:14 +0000

This summer, thanks to the Undergraduate Experiential Learning Opportunities Support Fund, I worked on “Inferring cognitive variables from behavior” under Dr. Paul Masset at 91˿��Ƶ, analyzing data from da Silva Castanheira et al. (2021) on how subjective confidence forms in uncertain, value-based decisions.

ARIA Spotlight: Warren Chen – Department of Philosophy

Warren Chen — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:18:15 +0000

This summer, I worked on an ARIA research project titled “Early Wittgenstein on Notations” under the supervision of Professor Dirk Schlimm. As part of Professor Schlimm’s broader focus on the history and philosophy of mathematical and logical notations, my project centered on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy as it pertains to the status and nature of logical notations—particularly in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921).

ARIA Spotlight: Rosa Chen – Department of Computer Science

Rosa Chen — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:11:42 +0000

My Arts Undergraduate Research Internship (ARIA) project is called “Improving Successor Feature Learning with Efficient Optimization Techniques,” supervised by Dr. Isabeau Prémont‑Schwarz. In simple terms, I worked on helping a learning program (an “agent”) learn useful patterns faster and reuse them across tasks, instead of starting from zero each time. This is practical because goals can change, and we want systems that adapt quickly without wasting computers.

ARIA Spotlight: Noah Aldinger – Department of Geography

Noah Aldinger — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 18:09:53 +0000

Firstly, I would like to thank, the Undergraduate Experiential Learning Opportunities Support Fund for enabling me to conduct this research assistant role. My Arts Undergraduate Research Internship (ARIA) research project was conducted with CurbCut, a group building a predictive housing model under the supervision of Dr. David Wachsmuth. This project aims to create sophisticated modeling tools for use by the federal government in understanding and predicting housing market trends across Canada.

ARIA Spotlight: Ava Sonies - Department of History

Ava Sonies — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:57:35 +0000

I would like to begin by thanking Mr Mark W. Gallop for his generous support of my ARIA research internship through the Mark W. Gallop Undergraduate Research Internship Award. This funding enabled me to pursue an incredible research opportunity that will have a profound impact on my academic and professional future.

ARIA Spotlight: Nikhil Raman - Department of Economics

Nikhil Raman — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:21:25 +0000

Firstly, I would like to extend my gratitude to Mr. Mark W. Gallop for granting me this research award. This summer, I worked with my Macroeconomics professor, Dr. Francisco Alvarez-Cuadrado alongside Ph.D. student Shu Chen on the project “Economic Growth and the Agricultural Productivity Gap.” My aim was to create a dataset tracking agricultural value added per worker, which measures productivity in the farming sector across countries and across time.

ARIA Spotlight: Ava-Udeane Ellis – Department of Political Science

Ava-Udeane Ellis — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 15:24:52 +0000

My Arts Undergraduate Research Internship (ARIA) research project: Adam Smith and the Separation of Powers, examined Adam Smith’s historical account of the separation of powers and its relationship with earlier articulations by Montesquieu and later formulations in the Federalist Papers by Publius. I worked with my supervisor, Professor Jacob Levy, to gather sources on the topic and incorporate them into a draft for an upcoming piece.

ARIA Spotlight: Rungano Carlyle-Hozaima – Department of Geography

Rungano Carlyle-Hozaima — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:03:39 +0000

I would like to begin by expressing my sincere gratitude to Mr. Mark W. Gallop for his generous funding of the Mr. Mark W. Gallop Arts Undergraduate Research Internship Award. “Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ʻĀina i ka Pono” means “The life of the land is perpetuated through correct governance.” King Kamehameha III spoke these words on July 31, 1843, the same day the Hawaiian Kingdom’s independence was restored after a brief but impactful overthrow of its sovereign government.

ARIA Spotlight: Anjali Sharma - Department of Psychology

Anjali Sharma — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:05:48 +0000

I would like to begin by expressing my sincere gratitude to Dr. Alan Ritter and Ms. Jennifer Ellen Nozick for their generous funding of the Jennifer Ritter Arts Internship Award. This summer, I had the privilege of conducting research in the Lydon Lab under the supervision of Dr. John E. Lydon.

ARIA Spotlight: Mikael Nakamura Vernet - Department of Psychology

Mikael Nakamura Vernet — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:57:54 +0000

I would like to begin by thanking Mr. Harry Samuel for the Harry Samuel Arts Undergraduate Research Internship Award I received that made this project possible. The ARIA research project I pursued this summer with Professor Jean-Francois Poulin was titled: “Assessing how disruptions in cortical activity during a critical developmental period impairs murine social behavior”. The overarching goal of the project was to understand the neuronal mechanisms underlying the way early life-seizures lead to social impairments associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

ARIA Spotlight: Leo Amorim – Department of Political Science

Leo Amorim — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 18:26:09 +0000

I want to begin by thanking Mr. Harry Samuel for enabling me to pursue this ARIA. This summer, I had the opportunity to work as an ARIA intern at the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC) under the supervision of Professor Dietlind Stolle thanks to the generous support of Mr. Harry Samuel. My research contributions spanned multiple projects aimed at eventual academic publication, allowing me to engage with diverse topics in political science.

ARIA Spotlight: Stellar Zhang - Department of Political Science

Stellar Zhang — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:45:17 +0000

This summer, I assisted Professor Elissa Berwick on a project about sub-state nationalism and independence referendums, examining in particular the cases of Quebec and Scotland. We aimed to use a regression discontinuity design (RDD) methodology to assess the impact of participating in a referendum on an individual’s long-term political identity, combining this with survey data and qualitative interviews.

ARIA Spotlight: Al Dervisevic – Department of Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies

Al Dervisevic — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:34:40 +0000

My project was an archival exhibit of Montreal’s queer food and drink history. The title of the project is “The History of Queer Food and Drink in Montreal” and I was supervised by Professor Alex Ketchum. The project includes a physical exhibit and a digital exhibit complete with visual and oral materials.

ARIA Spotlight: Amelia Kemp – Department of Political Science

Amelia Kemp — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 15:09:29 +0000

This summer, I had the pleasure of assisting Professor Yann Allard-Tremblay with a chapter in his book project, titled “On Being Repeatedly Gobsmacked: Crises, White Ignorance, and Normalizing Western Civilization’s Death Path”.

ARIA Spotlight: Estora Marshall - Department of Social Studies of Medicine

Estora Marshall — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 17:38:06 +0000

I want to begin by thanking Mr. Eric Maldoff, Mr. Gerry Maldoff, Mrs. Barbara Maldoff, and the late Mrs. Betty Maldoff for enabling me to pursue this ARIA. I was first introduced to the Maude Abbott Medical Museum (MAMM) as a volunteer, popping in between classes for an hour or two to clean and assist others in their research. I eventually began helping with initial provenance research that was being undertaken by another volunteer. We began to work out a system of recording provenance that would adapt to the unique challenges presented by working with human biological specimens.