PIRE Program Offers Rare International Research Opportunities to Undergraduates
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By Christine Byrd
June 10, 2024 At UC Irvine, the Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through a subaward from Pennsylvania State University, does something exceedingly rare: it enables undergraduates to conduct research abroad. Many of the student participants have never traveled overseas before this experience, when they spend eight weeks as visiting researchers exploring different aspects of bilingualism. PIRE opens doors to a world – literally – of research opportunities, providing a taste of what doctoral programs are like. Plenty of past participants have gone on to graduate school, with some even mentoring a new way of PIRE students. “For the undergraduates, it’s amazing the impact PIRE makes,” said Judith Kroll, Distinguished Professor of education, who directs the PIRE program at UCI. “They experience a different culture, different world, different lab and have to be independent and focused. We have many first-generation students who have participated and gone on to do doctoral programs, who never would have considered that before." |
Undergraduate students Berta Soler (left) and Alejandra Jimenez at the Mind, Brain and Behaviour Research Centre (CIMCYC) in Granada, Spain. Soler and Jimenez conducted research under the direction of María Teresa Bajo Molina.
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Undergraduate research
Kroll and her colleagues received her first NSF grant to start a PIRE program at Penn State, and continued it at the University of California, Riverside and, in 2019, brought it to UC Irvine. Her own research program examines the way bilinguals juggle two languages – looking at the cognitive functions that enable it, as well as the social and geographic contexts that affect language. Each quarter, 45 to 60 UCI students work with her, her graduate students and visitors in the Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain (BMB) Lab, supporting various research projects.
Guadalupe Aileen Mendoza, a graduate student in the School of Education, traveled to Beijing through the PIRE program when she was an undergraduate at UC Riverside. Her project explored the underlying mechanisms of bilingual speech planning among Mandarin-English speakers in a Mandarin-speaking environment. It was Mendoza’s first trip abroad, and it changed the trajectory of her career.
“My PIRE program experience is what motivated me to pursue research as a career, and catapulted me to my position now as a Ph.D. student,” said Mendoza. “Through PIRE, I’ve not only gained advanced research skills and deepened my understanding on topics related to bilingualism, but also expanded my professional network and gained valuable publication and presentation experience. Personally, these experiences have fostered resilience, cultural competence, and a profound sense of purpose.”
At UCI, Mendoza joined Kroll’s BMB lab where she became a mentor to undergraduates interested in bilingualism and the brain, while earning a prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship from NSF to support her work.
Relaunching PIRE
Built on a premise of sending students abroad to conduct research, the PIRE program was dramatically impacted by the pandemic. To sustain international research collaborations, the team pivoted to online collaborations, but Kroll and PIRE project manager Jennifer Fogarty were thrilled this spring to once again be able to send students abroad.
Julieta Monreal, a third-year education science major, and Kayla Zhang, a fourth-year language science major, traveled to Krakow, Poland to conduct research in the Psychology of Language and Bilingualism Lab directed by Zofia Wodniecka, Ph.D.
For Monreal, the experience has been one in a series of events that are helping her future take shape. After exploring majors from political science to art history, Monreal settled on education sciences as a way to examine policies and racial injustice in the school system. Her interest in bilingual research was piqued by a recruiting email from the BMB lab.
“I’m so fascinated with this research because I want to understand people like me, and how my brain can switch automatically between languages,” said Monreal. As a heritage Spanish speaker, Monreal grew up speaking Spanish until, like so many children of immigrants, she had to learn English in school and then teach it to her parents. After years of infrequently speaking Spanish in middle and high school, Monreal said she embraced new opportunities to speak Spanish more often in college.
With mentorship from Mendoza and Kroll remotely, and help from on-site by researchers in Poland, Monreal and Zhang recruited Polish and English speakers in Krakow to participate in experiments to better understand how they switch between languages in the context of a country where there are limited opportunities to use English. This summer in Southern California, they will collect additional data from heritage speakers who have ample opportunities to use both English and Spanish, and compare it with the data collected overseas.
Monreal is especially excited to continue this work, since the program further sparked her interest in research, and now she’s even considering pursuing a doctoral degree. She remembers the “aha” moment one day when a graduate student in the Krakow lab took the time to show her how to decode the data she had collected, and she was hooked.
“I had this moment of, ‘Oh my god, I love this!’ ” she recalled. “Research and being able to investigate something is so interesting to me, and I want to do more of it.”
Changing perspectives
Also this spring, fourth-year education science major Alejandra Jimenez and third-year language science student Berta Soler traveled to Granada, Spain, to conduct research in the Mind, Brain and Behaviour Research Centre (CIMCYC), under the direction of María Teresa Bajo Molina.
Jimenez, who aspires to become a teacher, joined the BMB Lab last year after taking a course on bilingualism. Kroll and Nick Sulier, a graduate student in education, both encouraged Jimenez to consider PIRE, even though she had never been abroad before. Because Sulier had collaborated virtually with the lab in Granada on his own research, he knew the experience would be a rewarding one for Jimenez.
Soler, who was born in Spain, and Jimenez spent eight weeks in Granada collecting data for their research. Jimenez was trying to replicate findings from a 2020 paper that compared cognition in different language contexts, and Soler was exploring how the acquisition of second languages is impacted by certain aspects of grammar in the speaker’s native language.
“This experience definitely clarified research as an avenue for the future and helped me imagine what working in a lab setting would be like,” said Soler. “It has been a great way to jump into a full-time research position surrounded by people who have taken this path and can offer advice.”
Although the experience did not change Jimenez’s future plans, she said it has reshaped her perspective.
“With this PIRE opportunity, I was able to see myself applying different skills I have learned in a new environment that might not have been as evident to me before,” Jimenez said. “I believe this immersive research experience has shown me things about myself beyond my academic skills, which I am incredibly grateful for and it has also allowed me to look back at my time earning my bachelor's degree in a new light.”
After eight years working with the PIRE program, Fogarty has come to expect that kind of reflection from participants. She said students often returned from their international research experience more confident and mature, due not only to their lab work but to having independently navigated life in a foreign country for two months. Seeing and supporting that growth is impactful for the graduate student mentors as well.
“Being able to see such a positive shift in both her research and interpersonal skills was really impactful for me,” said Sulier. “It shows how important experiences like these can be for young students.”
As the funding for the PIRE program winds down, Kroll hopes to find new avenues to continue offering these valuable international research experiences to undergraduates. In particular, she said UC Irvine is well-poised to lead collaborative research initiatives in Latin America, where there are several research labs already networked with Kroll’s.
“We have an international network of researchers and labs that grew out of PIRE,” said Kroll. “This is driven by our collective observation that we need to train our students to be global citizens, and to train ourselves to do collaborative work across borders, if we are going to answer the big questions about bilingualism, the mind and the brain.”
Kroll and her colleagues received her first NSF grant to start a PIRE program at Penn State, and continued it at the University of California, Riverside and, in 2019, brought it to UC Irvine. Her own research program examines the way bilinguals juggle two languages – looking at the cognitive functions that enable it, as well as the social and geographic contexts that affect language. Each quarter, 45 to 60 UCI students work with her, her graduate students and visitors in the Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain (BMB) Lab, supporting various research projects.
Guadalupe Aileen Mendoza, a graduate student in the School of Education, traveled to Beijing through the PIRE program when she was an undergraduate at UC Riverside. Her project explored the underlying mechanisms of bilingual speech planning among Mandarin-English speakers in a Mandarin-speaking environment. It was Mendoza’s first trip abroad, and it changed the trajectory of her career.
“My PIRE program experience is what motivated me to pursue research as a career, and catapulted me to my position now as a Ph.D. student,” said Mendoza. “Through PIRE, I’ve not only gained advanced research skills and deepened my understanding on topics related to bilingualism, but also expanded my professional network and gained valuable publication and presentation experience. Personally, these experiences have fostered resilience, cultural competence, and a profound sense of purpose.”
At UCI, Mendoza joined Kroll’s BMB lab where she became a mentor to undergraduates interested in bilingualism and the brain, while earning a prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship from NSF to support her work.
Relaunching PIRE
Built on a premise of sending students abroad to conduct research, the PIRE program was dramatically impacted by the pandemic. To sustain international research collaborations, the team pivoted to online collaborations, but Kroll and PIRE project manager Jennifer Fogarty were thrilled this spring to once again be able to send students abroad.
Julieta Monreal, a third-year education science major, and Kayla Zhang, a fourth-year language science major, traveled to Krakow, Poland to conduct research in the Psychology of Language and Bilingualism Lab directed by Zofia Wodniecka, Ph.D.
For Monreal, the experience has been one in a series of events that are helping her future take shape. After exploring majors from political science to art history, Monreal settled on education sciences as a way to examine policies and racial injustice in the school system. Her interest in bilingual research was piqued by a recruiting email from the BMB lab.
“I’m so fascinated with this research because I want to understand people like me, and how my brain can switch automatically between languages,” said Monreal. As a heritage Spanish speaker, Monreal grew up speaking Spanish until, like so many children of immigrants, she had to learn English in school and then teach it to her parents. After years of infrequently speaking Spanish in middle and high school, Monreal said she embraced new opportunities to speak Spanish more often in college.
With mentorship from Mendoza and Kroll remotely, and help from on-site by researchers in Poland, Monreal and Zhang recruited Polish and English speakers in Krakow to participate in experiments to better understand how they switch between languages in the context of a country where there are limited opportunities to use English. This summer in Southern California, they will collect additional data from heritage speakers who have ample opportunities to use both English and Spanish, and compare it with the data collected overseas.
Monreal is especially excited to continue this work, since the program further sparked her interest in research, and now she’s even considering pursuing a doctoral degree. She remembers the “aha” moment one day when a graduate student in the Krakow lab took the time to show her how to decode the data she had collected, and she was hooked.
“I had this moment of, ‘Oh my god, I love this!’ ” she recalled. “Research and being able to investigate something is so interesting to me, and I want to do more of it.”
Changing perspectives
Also this spring, fourth-year education science major Alejandra Jimenez and third-year language science student Berta Soler traveled to Granada, Spain, to conduct research in the Mind, Brain and Behaviour Research Centre (CIMCYC), under the direction of María Teresa Bajo Molina.
Jimenez, who aspires to become a teacher, joined the BMB Lab last year after taking a course on bilingualism. Kroll and Nick Sulier, a graduate student in education, both encouraged Jimenez to consider PIRE, even though she had never been abroad before. Because Sulier had collaborated virtually with the lab in Granada on his own research, he knew the experience would be a rewarding one for Jimenez.
Soler, who was born in Spain, and Jimenez spent eight weeks in Granada collecting data for their research. Jimenez was trying to replicate findings from a 2020 paper that compared cognition in different language contexts, and Soler was exploring how the acquisition of second languages is impacted by certain aspects of grammar in the speaker’s native language.
“This experience definitely clarified research as an avenue for the future and helped me imagine what working in a lab setting would be like,” said Soler. “It has been a great way to jump into a full-time research position surrounded by people who have taken this path and can offer advice.”
Although the experience did not change Jimenez’s future plans, she said it has reshaped her perspective.
“With this PIRE opportunity, I was able to see myself applying different skills I have learned in a new environment that might not have been as evident to me before,” Jimenez said. “I believe this immersive research experience has shown me things about myself beyond my academic skills, which I am incredibly grateful for and it has also allowed me to look back at my time earning my bachelor's degree in a new light.”
After eight years working with the PIRE program, Fogarty has come to expect that kind of reflection from participants. She said students often returned from their international research experience more confident and mature, due not only to their lab work but to having independently navigated life in a foreign country for two months. Seeing and supporting that growth is impactful for the graduate student mentors as well.
“Being able to see such a positive shift in both her research and interpersonal skills was really impactful for me,” said Sulier. “It shows how important experiences like these can be for young students.”
As the funding for the PIRE program winds down, Kroll hopes to find new avenues to continue offering these valuable international research experiences to undergraduates. In particular, she said UC Irvine is well-poised to lead collaborative research initiatives in Latin America, where there are several research labs already networked with Kroll’s.
“We have an international network of researchers and labs that grew out of PIRE,” said Kroll. “This is driven by our collective observation that we need to train our students to be global citizens, and to train ourselves to do collaborative work across borders, if we are going to answer the big questions about bilingualism, the mind and the brain.”
Meet the PIRE Research Team
Judith Kroll
Director, PIRE program at UCI Distinguished Professor, School of Education |
Connor Mayer
PIRE Mentor Assistant Professor, Department of Language Science |
Teresa Bajo
PIRE-NSF Granada Coordinator Professor, University of Granada, Spain |
Jennifer Fogarty
PIRE Program Project Manager School of Education |
Lupe Mendoza
PIRE Graduate Student Mentor School of Education |
Nick Sulier
PIRE Graduate Student Mentor School of Education |
Alejandra Jimenez
PIRE Fellow School of Education |
Julieta Monreal
PIRE Fellow School of Education |
Berta Soler
PIRE Fellow Department of Language Science |
