Undergraduate student opportunities
Research with faculty
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Thang Dinh
- Area: Quantum Computing & Graph Machine Learning
- Opportunity: Funded or volunteer research assistant
- Role description: Implement algorithms, perform numerical analysis, and write reports
- Contact: Send CV and transcripts to Dr. Dinh at tndinh@vcu.edu
- Lab/Group: https://thang-dinh.github.io/
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Bridget Thomson-McInnes
- Area: Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Extraction, Biomedical Informatics
- Opportunity: Research assistant roles in various NLP and biomedical projects
- Role description: Work may involve named entity recognition, relation/event extraction, text mining, or applying large language models to biomedical/clinical text. Students can gain experience in annotation, corpus development, model training and evaluation, or tool development
- Contact: Email Dr. Thomson-McInnes at btmcinnes@vcu.edu
- Lab/Group: https://nlp.cs.vcu.edu/research.html | https://vip.vcu.edu/nanoinformatics/
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Tamer Nadeem
- Area: Health Applications, Sensor Data, Smart Environments
- Opportunity: Volunteer undergraduate research assistant (NIH-funded HomePal project + related projects like BabyTalk)
- Role description: Work with real-world sensor data streams—cleaning, processing, and analyzing data to infer daily activities and mobility patterns. Opportunities to contribute to health-focused applications that support patient well-being and family engagement.
- Familiarity with programming is required (Python preferred), along with curiosity, reliability, and a willingness to learn. If you’re excited by improving health through your CS knowledge, we’d love to hear from you!
- Contact: Email Dr. Nadeem at tnadeem@vcu.edu (subject line must start with CS-UGrad)
- Lab/Group: https://music.lab.vcu.edu
Programs
UR2PhD Program
The Undergraduate Research to PhD program (“UR2PhD”, pronounced "you are to PhD") helps undergraduate students explore research opportunities, connect with graduate students and faculty mentors, and prepare for advanced studies.