The Fisher Institute of Health and Well-being in the College of Health offers opportunities for student internships and part-time research assistant positions (e.g., related to child health, obesity and chronic disease prevention).
1) Opportunities
The students will be involved in research projects regarding childhood obesity prevention, healthy eating and physical activity promotion, non-communicable chronic disease prevention, global health, etc, and will work with an interdisciplinary international collaboration team led by Professor Youfa Wang1, who recently joined BSU. Some of the projects are NIH-funded ones in the United States, China and other international settings, and some are collaboration projects with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and other domestic and international institutions such as the China CDC. The students will work as interns, student workers, graduate research assistants, with payment or as a volunteer, depending on the students’ situation/qualifications and project needs.
The research projects provide students with good training and research opportunities, including improving skills for data collection and analysis, getting publications as coauthors, conducting intern projects at the NASA Space Center, reporting research in research conferences, traveling to study sites including international ones for data collection, and developing graduate thesis research projects.
2) Responsibilities
Student work may involve assistance with data collection, data analysis, literature search, and preparation of research reports. Possibilities also exist to attend and assist research team meetings.
3) Requirements & How to apply
Current graduate students enrolled in BSU with the following qualifications are desired: health-related training and research experiences such as in nutrition, epidemiology, health promotion, health economics, exercise science, GIS, and data analysis; good communication skills; interpersonal skills; international living and work experience are a plus. Some positions (eg. summer internship with NASA) are US citizens or permanent residents only.
Interested candidates should email CV as a word file, and a 1-2 page cover letter describing related background, research/training plans, available time for research, names and contact information of three references, to Dr. Jungwon Min, jmin@bsu.edu
1Dr. Wang is the John and Janice Fisher Endowed Chair of Wellness; Associate Director, Fisher Institute of Health and Well-being; Director, Systems-Oriented Global Childhood Obesity Intervention Program; and Professor, Department of Nutrition and Health Science in the College of Health at Ball State University. Previously he worked as a professor and director at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Johns Hopkins University. As an internationally-known expert, he has over 220 publications. His research interests focus on obesity; nutritional epidemiology; child health; non-communicable chronic diseases; health disparities; global health; systems science methods; BigData and mHealth. As the principal investigator, he has secured approximately $23 million in NIH grants including multiple R01s and a U54 center award. He has served on numerous national and international expert panels, review committees and leadership positions, including serving on over 20 NIH and CDC grant review committees, as a WHO and United Nations consultant, as Chair of the American Society for Nutrition (ASN) Nutrition Epidemiology Section, and Chair of The Obesity Society (TOS) Pediatric Obesity Section.