come join us!

PhD students

If you are interested in applying for a PhD in Comparative Human Development to work with Dr. Casillas, please get in touch with her. Include a CV and a brief description of what your mutual interests are and what you would like to know more about regarding the program and work in the lab.

Interns and research assistantships

The chatter lab offers a small number of paid internships for undergraduate students who want to get short-term (3 month) hands-on experience with an existing lab project. Internships are not renewable and will conclude with a short report.

We also offer a small number of research assistantships for longer time periods (i.e., 6 months and longer). Research assistants will be assigned to more in-depth tasks for existing lab projects, with tasks matched as much as possible by the student’s research interest. These positions are renewable and applicable for both graduate and undergraduate UChicago students.

If you are interested in joining as an intern or research assistant, please contact Dr. Casillas with information about your major, your interests in lab research, your availability, what type of position you’d be interested in, and any questions you might have about the lab.

Internship opportunities for summer quarter 2025

The following internship positions are open for UChicago undergraduate students for summer quarter 2025 at the chatter lab:

(1) Summer Apprenticeship

Refer to the flyer below:

(2) College Summer Institute (CSI) Deadline: April 2, 2025

Apply here! Project description below (as it appears on CSI website):

Learning Language from Everyday Talk [up to 3 research appointments]: In the first few years of life, children go from knowing almost nothing about the language of their community to being able to speak in full sentences about abstract concepts. How is this achieved? Such young children do not glean this information from schools, textbooks, or formal tutoring. Rather, they infer it via everyday interactions with others. This CSI project seeks to shed new light on how children pick up language in the context of, and for application in, everyday interaction. We seek up to three CSI Scholars who would like to participate in a team research project on children’s exposure to peer- and adult-conversations in the home. The broader project includes multiple sub-studies on children acquiring English, Mandarin, Korean, Tseltal, and other languages. Depending on the match between student interests/training and available tasks, a research assistant’s role will include some combination of transcription, data annotation, and in-lab experiments with infants. All mentees in the lab receive excellent daily supervision from the lab manager and senior project members, in addition to regular contact with the lab’s primary investigator (Dr. Marisa Casillas). Research assistants are also expected to participate in weekly lab meetings and to conduct a small literature review on each sub-study to which they contribute. Research Mentor: Marisa Casillas, Assistant Professor, Comparative Human Development.