Category: Conduct Research

lab experiences, humanities research, fieldwork, archives, methods, problem solving, research based courses

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Conduct Research Get Started with Research

From Lab Bench to Laptop: Exploring Computational and Experimental Research

A screenshot of a simulation of thousands of water molecules and a larger organic molecule on top.
A molecular simulation of a per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals”) molecule at the air-water interface — part of my research experience this past summer.

The image that scientific research conjures is that of a lab coat-clad scientist hunched over cell cultures or mixing unknown chemicals in a fume hood. I bet you wouldn’t believe it if I told you my summer research experience was more like a 9-to-5 desk job — running Excel formulas across five spreadsheets and refilling my coffee mug every two hours. 

Coming into Princeton, I was undecided about my academic and research interests. I had done wet-lab chemistry research in high school and enjoyed it, but I also liked computer science and wasn’t ready to leave it behind either. Thus, early on, I set out to gain both experimental and computational research experience. A first-year seminar on computational molecular modelling led me to continue this work over the summer through a High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI) internship. This semester, I am turning to the experimental side, conducting independent work on making porous materials called zeolites for natural gas purification and carbon capture. Working on both theory and experiments has given me a clearer picture of what research looks like from either side, and I hope my experience helps if you’re also drawn to both.

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Conduct Research Research Life

The Realities of Researching Babies

Princeton Baby Lab waiting room
Princeton Baby Lab, Princeton’s developmental psychology lab, located in Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI). Photo Credit: Jamilah Araf

Often, when we picture research, we think of beakers or microscopes. However, the study of humans looks very different. I hope to shine light on social science research, specifically psychology research, at Princeton using my experience at the Princeton Baby Lab.

This summer, I worked alongside five other research assistants in the Princeton Baby Lab, Princeton’s developmental psychology lab. All of the projects in the Baby Lab work towards understanding how we learn language during development. However, the projects used a variety of methods to approach this question.

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Conduct Research Get Started with Research Research Life Resources

Close One Door, and Another Will Open

A field ecologist looks through an endless field of seaweed.
Fieldwork in the Intertidal. Photo Credit: Marshall Mumford.

It’s okay to fail. No, really, it is. You may feel that the achievements that brought you here have put you on a pedestal, destined to keep rising higher and higher, but someday that pedestal will break or crumble, and you must figure out how to keep going. 

This is true especially in research. Having been involved in scientific research from the early days of doing science fair, to analyzing my data for my senior thesis, I feel like I have rather good authority to speak on failure. These are my four tips for coping with failure as you embark on your research journey. 

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Conduct Research Independent Work Present & Publish Findings Research Life Resources

How to Make a Poster: 5 Things I Learned from a Poster Workshop

Over the last few weeks of the semester, I needed to make two posters. In preparation, I attended a poster workshop that made me think more intentionally about how to make an effective poster. I’ve outlined some of my key takeaways below that I hope can offer guidance to anyone preparing a poster of their own. 

Image of Princeton Research Day from a higher vantage point in the Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton Research Day in the Princeton University Art Museum. Photo credit: Sameer Khan / Fotobuddy.
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Conduct Research Independent Work Resources

Traveling with Purpose: How Academic Travel Enriched My Experiences

Just this year, I had the opportunity to travel through Princeton twice: once over winter break for my senior thesis and PIIRS Undergraduate Fellowship fieldwork in Taiwan, and again over spring break through ART 481: Alaskan Art, Spirit, and Being: Healing Histories of Dispossession, when I traveled to Alaska for class. As a senior in my final spring semester, spending both my last winter and spring breaks traveling for academic purposes has been more than fulfilling. It has been one of the most meaningful parts of my Princeton experience.

Both trips reminded me that academic travel is about much more than going somewhere new. Traveling with purpose changes what you notice, who you meet, and what you are able to learn. It opens up conversations, relationships, and opportunities for insight that you likely would not have had otherwise.

Local fishermen sitting near fishing rod on shore, looking out into a horizon of oyster aquaculture and an offshore wind farm
Local fishers on shore against a backdrop of oyster aquaculture and the Yunlin Offshore Wind Farm.
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Conduct Research Present & Publish Findings Research Life Resources

Understanding the Invisible: Rishika’s Work in Space and Plasma Physics

At Princeton, research does not always look the way people imagine. It is not always telescopes pointed toward the sky or chalkboards filled with equations. Sometimes, it happens in quiet laboratories where the goal is to understand things you cannot even see, like streams of charged particles moving through space.

For Rishika Porandla, a member of the Class of 2028 majoring in astrophysics, this is exactly where her work lives. Her research sits at the intersection of space, plasma, and the instruments that allow scientists to study both.

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Conduct Research Present & Publish Findings Research Life

Tiny Models, Big Impact: Erika Yeung’s Work in Edge AI

Picture of Erika Yeung
Picture of Erika Yeung.

When Erika Yeung arrived at Princeton, she knew she was drawn to the intersection of hardware and intelligence, the idea that physical systems like chips and sensors could not only compute, meaning process information, but also perceive the world, learn from data, and adapt over time. As a sophomore in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, she took a bold step into that space through independent research with Professor Hossein Valavi. Her work focused on how neural networks, which are computer models inspired by the way the human brain processes information, can be redesigned to run efficiently on edge devices. These are small, local devices such as phones, sensors, or embedded systems that operate without relying on distant cloud servers.

At the heart of Erika’s work was quantization, a technique that reduces the numerical precision of neural network weights, which are the internal values that determine how the model makes decisions. Instead of using highly precise numbers, quantization simplifies them into smaller, more compact representations. This allows the model to take up less memory and run faster while still maintaining strong performance. This idea is central to fields like Edge AI and TinyML, which aim to move machine learning out of large data centers and into everyday devices, from wearable health monitors to autonomous systems operating far from the cloud. Running AI locally means the models must be not only accurate, but also lightweight, fast, and energy efficient. Quantization offers one of the most promising ways to make that possible.

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Conduct Research Independent Work

Of Mistakes and Bullies in the Lab

This is Dr Kang discussing something with an unidentified lab member. The ambience is meant to depict the kinds of conversations you have with supervisors about data and any mistakes you made during procedures.
Lab members being lab members (Kang Lab). Photo credit: Matt Raspanti, Office of Communications.

Everyone knows the old mantras: “don’t be too harsh on yourself” and “everyone makes mistakes.” When I joined a lab, though, not only were those mantras pushed to the back of my head, but they also collected dust and withered. In a lab setting, when you are aware of the money and effort other people have put into the research, and when you sometimes feel less skilled as an undergrad, your mistakes can feel like grave failures.

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Conduct Research Independent Work Present & Publish Findings

Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Sophomore Research Seminars

The exterior of the New South Building with fall foliage.
New South, where many first-year writing seminars and sophomore research seminars take place.

First-year writing seminars are a rite of passage for all Princeton students, introducing you to the research and writing skills you need to craft an independent research paper. But what comes next? For many undergraduates, sophomore year is a year-long pause before you actually get to apply those independent research skills in your JP. The Princeton Writing Program’s sophomore research seminars offer an alternative.

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Conduct Research Independent Work

Growing Up in the Same Lab

Members of the Norman Lab taking a group picture together
Norman Lab group picture

After the first meeting of the semester with my adviser, whom I’ve been working with since my first-year spring, I looked at the list of papers I had to read for my junior independent work but chose to open the small birthday card my adviser gave me on behalf of the lab. Seeing everyone’s “Happy Birthday” made me feel, more than ever before, like I belonged. 

And I was growing up.

I was energized, ready to take on a new responsibility. Since the conversation I had with my PI over the summer, I had been excited to get started. Coming into Princeton interested in memory and potential ways to manipulate unwanted or negative ones, getting to use eye trackers to exert top-down control over what people look at and induce forgetting by weakening the activation of the related pathways based on the eye gaze pattern seemed like a sci-fi movie coming to life. I couldn’t wait to feel ownership over my own project and contribute to the kind of work my lab cares so much about.

After two years, I started to feel like I was equipped to excel on all fronts at Princeton.

But reality… hit.

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