The 2026 STaRT@Rice was 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