STaRT@Rice
STaRT@Rice is an innovative program that will provide a panoramic view of the research process and offer professionalization opportunities. It will increase expertise via exposure in applied workshops. Participants will learn how to ask better questions about the research process and develop important professional skills. Workshops will cover a broad range of content, moving from introductory to intermediate to advanced. Thus, participants can choose workshops matching their skill sets and background.
The 2026 STaRT@Rice will be held on October 2-4.
2026 STaRT@Rice Schedule
Friday, October 2
1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Ethnographic Techniques (Cymene Howe) | Kraft Hall 302
Creating Packages in R for Reusing, Testing, and Sharing Code (Sean Smith) | Kraft Hall 202
How Federal Research Funding Works: Tips and Strategies for Getting Funded (Simon Fischer-Baum) | Kraft Hall 341
Lasso and Ridge Regression in R (Scott Powers) | Kraft Hall 380
Welcome Reception | Kraft Hall 130
4:30 pm
Opening Remarks
Research Relays
Light Bites
Saturday, October 3
8:00 am - 9:00 am
Breakfast with STaRT@Rice faculty and participants | Kraft Hall 130
9:00 am - 4:00 pm
Spatial Analysis in R (Elizabeth Roberto) (6-hour) | Kraft Hall 120
9:00 am - 12:00 pm
Web-Scraping with R (Alex Pugh) | Kraft Hall 110
Coding and Memoing in Qualitative Analysis (Anna Rhodes) | Kraft Hall 125
Introduction to Python (Hua Gong) | Kraft Hall 105
Demographic Detectives: Methods for Decoding Population Trends (Kevin Thomas) | Kraft Hall 102
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Lunch with STaRT@Rice faculty and participants | Kraft Hall 130
1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Effective Research Presentations (Kyung-Hee Bae) | Kraft Hall 110
Sociolinguistics and Language Discrimination (Nancy Niedzielski & Bryce McCleary) | Kraft Hall 105
Visualizing Text Data: An Introduction in Python (Corey Abramson) | Kraft Hall 125
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Light bites with STaRT@Rice faculty and participants | Kraft Hall 130
Sunday, October 4
8:00 am - 9:00 am
Breakfast with STaRT@Rice faculty and participants | Kraft Hall 130
9:00 am - 4:00 pm
Quantile Regression for Social Sciences (Huixia Judy Wang) (6-hour) | Kraft Hall 105
9:00 am - 12:00 pm
The Science and Art of Editing Your Own Work and Others’ (Ilana Gershon) | Kraft Hall 125
Using and Evaluating Large Language Models for Social Science Research (Siyu Liang) | Kraft Hall 110
Machine Learning (Edgar Avalos Gauna) | Kraft Hall 102
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Lunch with STaRT@Rice faculty and participants | Kraft Hall 130
1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Survival Modeling and Time-to-Event Analyses (George Kypriotakis) | Kraft Hall 125
Data Aggregation in Multi-Level Research: Theoretical and Statistical Considerations (James LeBreton) | Kraft Hall 110
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Light bites with STaRT@Rice faculty and participants | Kraft Hall 130
Closing Remarks