If you had asked Kennedy King, A25, a cognitive and brain science and philosophy double major, this spring if she could see herself going for a Ph.D., “I probably would have laughed,” she says. What a difference a summer can make.

King is one of 27 students who took part in the Visiting Early Research Scholars’ Experiences (VERSE) program from June to August, working directly with faculty on a variety of projects. In King’s case, she worked in the Integrative Cognitive Neuroscience Lab run by Elizabeth Race, an associate professor of psychology. 

“My favorite part about the VERSE program is how immersive and how representative of the research experience it is,” King says. “I’m working like a grad student would, going to lab meetings, developing proposals, doing a whole ton of reading. For people interested in an academic career, the VERSE program offers a great landscape for seeing what it would be like and if it’s good fit for you.”

That’s one of the points of the program, says Ayanna Thomas, dean of research for Arts and Sciences, professor of psychology, and co-director of VERSE, which is open to all students, particularly those coming from colleges and universities that have limited research options for their students.

The 10-week program, which provides on-campus housing and a $6,500 stipend to participants, this summer had participants from Assumption University, Beloit College, the University of Southern Mississippi, and Bluefield State University, among others, including Tufts.

Faculty at Tufts are recruited to take part during the school year—most are from the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering. Many have active research programs and integrate VERSE students into them. When applying to the program, students pick a faculty member with whom they would like to work.

This year, there were more than 180 applications. Thomas and VERSE co-director Ashon Bradford, assistant dean of diversity and inclusion at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, screen all applications, and pass them to the faculty who select participants with interests associated with their research. 

“I think VERSE demystifies the whole research process, and makes it much more accessible to the students,” says Race.

Research on Real World Digital Threats

This is the third year that Daniel Votipka, Lin Family assistant professor of computer science, has worked with VERSE students. “The students have been extremely beneficial to the lab, getting lots of really interesting research done,” he says. In fact, several ended up becoming co-authors on research papers based on their work with him. 

The program “also gives them a lot of opportunity to try new things, to be involved in a lot of different projects, using different skills from programming and data science to running human subjects research,” Votipka says.

This summer, he had two students working in the Security and Privacy Lab, conducting research on topical issues. 

Subhikshya “Suvi” Lamaon, a student at the University of Southern Mississippi, took part in a project to measure and understand techniques that are used to manipulate online searches. Lamaon collected daily Google search result data for politicians running for office in 2024 and for CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies. The goal was to look for anomalies in that data to understand tactics being used to manipulate search results.

“She’s been helping us write additional code to collect data that we need in support of that, as well as doing some qualitative analysis,” says Votipka.

Also in Votipka’s lab, Yaejie “Gia” Kwon, an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, worked on building a tool for threat modeling—essentially trying to figure all the things that can go wrong in a computer system. She developed the infrastructure that allows researchers to track all the interactions a user has with a system to better understand the process.

Freedom in Art

Though most of VERSE focuses on the sciences, the program accommodates many different fields—and students. Case in point is John Sanchez, a graphic artist and 2024 graduate of the Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College (TUPIT). He worked this summer on an arts research project with Michael Smoot, professor of the practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.

Sanchez’s focus was a personal take on Norman Rockwell’s series of paintings called Four Freedoms from 1943, looking at the paintings through the lens of contemporary culture. He made a series of prints with the goal of creating an artist’s book on the subject. 

“Being in the program has been empowering,” Sanchez says. “I’ve learned new skills through printmaking. I’ve been able to do research about printmaking and art as a democratic process as well. I believe that art is a major part of our democracy—of freedom of speech and expression. Getting to put it together in an artist’s book, which is what I’m doing, has been very enlightening.”

Smoot, who teaches printmaking, also teaches with TUPIT, and Sanchez was in a drawing class of his while incarcerated. “We talked quite a bit about his goals upon release, what he wanted to do,” Smoot says. “One of them was that he wanted to attend graduate school for art, and we talked a little bit about developing portfolio and how that works and what that process is.”

Through the VERSE program, Smoot worked with Sanchez on different techniques and processes for printmaking—including relief, etching, intaglio, and lithography. In July they spent several weeks focused on screen printing, which Sanchez used for his Four Freedoms work.

“I’m a returning citizen, so some of my life experiences are coming through in this project, talking about what is it that these freedoms mean in different communities and how different communities can participate in the democratic process,” Sanchez says. “I think it’s important to understand that that process starts through the classroom as well. Higher education has played a major part in my coming back and reintegrating into community.”

A Platform for Emerging Leaders 

The VERSE program isn’t just about research. A graduate assistant assigned to the group organizes social activities on a regular basis, like a trip to Martha’s Vineyard, which helps students connect since they work in different parts of campus.

Thomas and Bradford also set up a series of professional development activities on Friday afternoons, led by faculty or staff, that focus on building useful skills, from personal finance to presentation tips to résumé building. 

The last session focused on the path to graduate school, which many of the students might not have previously considered. Thomas proudly notes that two of the first VERSE students she took on in 2018, when she was a faculty advisor, went on to graduate work—even if it wasn’t in psychology. 

Funding for the program comes from a variety of sources. Often faculty have research grants from sources like the National Science Foundation, which includes money for student research assistance. An anonymous donor this year gave money that covered the costs for one 2024 VERSE student, for which Thomas was most grateful. “We’re always looking for funding,” she says. 

And the benefits aren’t just for the students. Faculty get a boost from very motivated students who work in the labs when other students are mostly away. And seeing students become excited about research over the 10 weeks “is really a fantastic experience,” says Race. 

A Path to Graduate School

For King, working in the psychology lab was a natural outcome of her interest in cognitive science. She worked with an existing large brain imaging dataset to see whether the size of different brain regions, particularly those associated with memory formation, are related to the ability to remember specific details about past events. 

“She was learning how to look at brain images and pull that data, measure the volume of different brain regions that she might be interested in, and correlating that with memory performance,” says Race, her advisor. 

King also worked closely with a graduate student who is running a behavioral study looking at the misinformation effect. That’s when individuals who, say, witness a crime or experience an event, are afterward exposed to misleading information about that event and incorporate some of that misinformation into their memory, says Race. 

The research led King to a topic for a senior thesis at Tufts, focused on the phenomenological aspects of eyewitness memory—“the subjective experience that accompanies people as they remember something,” she says. Early in the summer, she did an extensive literature search, finding gaps in the literature for a particular area to focus on. 

“One of the incredible things about this program,” says Race, “is not only that it exposes students to the research process, but that it gives students an opportunity to think through how they can come up with their own research questions and projects, and hopefully continue research into the rest of their undergraduate career and potentially graduate school.”

That’s certainly the case for King. Now a senior, she says that “I really think that I would enjoy getting a Ph.D., specifically in cognitive science. A really good thing about this program is that it makes research and a career in academia seem tangible.”