For undergrads & prospective students

Written By Princeton CoLab .

Open undergraduate research opportunities

Conducting research is a team effort, and we are often looking for undergraduate research assistants and independent work students to help run studies. Many of our research opportunities require no prior research experience or programming skills . All you need is to be organized, consistent, and excited to learn about research!

If you are interested in joining any of the projects below as a Research Assistant, please contact the project lead (included in the project description) and fill out our RA application form.

There are currently no open positions—please check back in the summer for fall research opportunities!

Getting the most (fun) out of research

🐯 denotes resources developed by CoLab members!

Core skills

Research and funding opportunities

Applying to graduate school

Preparing your application

Mentorship & orientation programs

Preparing your application

Acing your PhD interview

FAQ for prospective students

Natalia is accepting graduate students for the 2026-27 admissions cycle.

Resources:

  • I am be accepting graduate students in the 2026-2027 admissions cycle.

  • To help level the playing field, I generally do not take meetings with prospective students before applications are due. However, I look forward to seeing your materials, if you do decide to apply!

    Here’s the advice I would give you anyway, if we did meet: The PhD “personal statement” is misleadingly named—it’s actually a persuasive essay. Your personal statement should lay out a case for:

    1. What research “puzzle” do you want to pursue in graduate school, and why is it important?

    2. How have your professional/research experiences prepared you to pursue this puzzle?

    3. Why is my lab/the psych department at UCSD a good place to carry out this research?

    For this last question, I hope my students will continue investigating the questions I have been pursuing, but I’m personally also very excited to collaborate with other labs across the department, and I hope that my students will initiate some of those collaborations. So, with that in mind, I encourage you to list a secondary mentor in your application who has complementary skills or interests. (Note that, even if the department website says that a particular faculty member is not accepting students in this cycle, they may still be open to collaborating.)

  • Broadly, the goal of my research program is to understand how humans collaborate. In the 2026-27 cycle and beyond, the lab will focus on developing online multiplayer games to answer fundamental questions about how humans organize into different kinds of teams to achieve different kinds of goals.

  • My favorite part of science is other people. It brings me a lot of joy to work through puzzles with my collaborators, and to see solutions emerge that none of us could have thought of on our own—so much so, in fact, that trying to understand how that magic happens, and how communities can make collaborations fun and fair for everyone, have become the driving force of my research.

    As a mentor, I am also excited to translate these questions into practice. As I see it, the most important part of my job is to build a community where my mentees can thrive. You can find a working draft of my mentoring philosophy here.

  • Thank you for your interest in our lab! We do not currently have open volunteer spots, but please watch this page for updates.

  • We do not have any opportunities for high school students to join the lab as a research assistant.

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For current PhD students & postdocs