Read Me Before You Reach Out

Hi, and welcome. If you are a student thinking about joining the CARE Lab, I'm genuinely glad you landed here. Taking a few minutes with this page will help you figure out whether the lab is the right fit for you right now, and it will help me meet you where you are when we talk.

Sitting in on lab meetings

You are warmly welcome to experience what research looks like in the lab by joining our weekly lab meetings. Come sit with us, brainstorm, discuss, and think alongside me and my PhD students. This is the best way to get a feel for our research scope, our working style, and the kinds of questions we care about. No formal commitment required on either side. You are welcome to just come, listen, and see how it feels.

Ask questions too. Curiosity is a good sign, and lab meetings are a place where questions are taken seriously, whether they are about an ongoing project, a method someone used, or a paper you read and want to talk about. You are also welcome to proactively reach out to me or my PhD students outside of meetings for questions or clarifications. We would rather you ask than wonder quietly.

Joining an active project

Once a research project has launched, I do not add student workers or volunteers to the project team. Project teams are set at the start, and mid-stream additions rarely work well for the student or the team. Asking questions and learning from an ongoing project is always welcome.

Proposing your own project

After you have attended lab meetings for at least a month and have a clear sense of what the lab does, you are very welcome to bring your own ideas to me and the team. This is one of my favorite parts of running the lab, so please do not hesitate.

If we move forward together, you will be the lead on your project. My PhD students and I will support you throughout the process, but the status and progress will depend entirely on you. That means you decide whether to drive your work all the way to a final product, design, or publication, whether to pause, or whether to terminate.

One important exception. Once significant time, effort, and funding have been invested in a project, especially after we finalize the IRB, if you decide to step away, the lab will take the project over and carry it forward from that point on. This is not meant to punish anyone for leaving. It protects the time everyone else has put in and honors the commitments we have made to participants and funders.

Authorship

Authorship is something I care about getting right, so I want to be transparent upfront. What I describe here follows the authorship standards used by ACM (our main HCI venue), the Human Factors journal, and most engineering venues. These are field-wide norms, not lab-specific rules:

• Leading a project usually means first authorship. If you proposed it, designed it, and drove it to completion, your name goes first.
• Authorship requires two things, not one. First, a substantial intellectual contribution to the research itself (design, data collection, analysis, or interpretation). Second, a real contribution to the manuscript: drafting sections, substantively revising for intellectual content, or meaningfully responding to reviewer comments. Authors are also expected to review and approve the final version and take responsibility for the work.
• Zero to minimal contribution to the writeup means no authorship, even if you helped with parts of the research earlier on. Running participants, cleaning data, or sitting in on meetings is valuable, but it does not by itself meet the authorship bar.
• Acknowledgments are where meaningful non-authorship contributions are recognized. If you helped but your contribution does not meet both bars above, you will be named in the acknowledgments section. This is standard and respected in our field.
• Author order beyond first author reflects the relative size of each contribution. We will have this conversation together once the writeup is underway, so there are no surprises.
• I will talk with you about authorship early. If you are on a project heading toward publication, I want you to know where you stand well before submission, not at the last minute.

None of this is personal. It is how authorship works across our field, and being clear about it upfront is better than an awkward conversation later.

Paid student worker positions

When a funded student worker position opens up, it goes to a student who has already been working with me and the lab for longer than one semester. If you are new to the lab, the path looks like this: show up to meetings, ask questions, propose a project, lead it well, and build a track record. That is what puts you in a strong position when a paid opportunity appears.

What I'm looking for

Motivation and curiosity. Those are the two things I cannot teach. Everything else, we can learn together.

If you have read this far, thank you. I hope this gave you a clearer picture of how the lab works. If it sounds like a fit, please reach out. I look forward to meeting you.