Research

Research Projects

Interested in joining a project? Please contact Dr. Katz via the Contact page with a brief note about your interests and CV/resume.

National Science Foundation CAREER Award$592,0002024-2028Active StudyOpen for Students

CAREER: Minds and Machines: Exploring Engineering Faculty Member Mental Models of Generative AI and Instructional Decisions

Investigating faculty mental models of generative AI in engineering education

Research question: How do engineering faculty understand generative AI, and how do those mental models shape instructional decisions?

Project details

Current opportunity

Undergraduate Research AssistantUndergradIn-personFall 2025
National Science Foundation$174,616September 2024 - August 2027Active StudyOpen for Students

The Engineering Master's Workforce: Leveraging Natural Language Processing Techniques to Understand Employer Demands and Student Goals

Studying labor market trends by analyzing job postings with natural language processing to understand employer demands and how they align with engineering master's student goals.

Research question: Analyze large-scale job postings to extract employer demands and skill requirements

Project details

Current opportunity

Undergraduate Research Assistant (NLP + Labor Market Analysis)UndergradRemote
NBME Stemmler Award$136,2962023-2025Active StudyOpen for Students

Operationalizing, Validating, and Scaling Health Systems Citizenship Assessment in Undergraduate Medical Education

Developing NLP and AI-based tools to support assessment of health systems citizenship and to characterize medical students' mental models of health systems.

Research question: Design and validate NLP/AI pipelines to analyze assessment artifacts

Project details

Current opportunity

Undergraduate Research Assistant (NLP for Health Systems Assessment)UndergradRemote
Seed Project (Unfunded)Unfunded2025–2026SeedOpen for Students

Exploring student perceptions of generative AI expressed on social media

Large-scale qualitative analysis of opinions and perspectives about generative AI expressed on social media (e.g., Reddit). We will use NLP and LLM-assisted workflows to sample, code, and synthesize themes across communities over time.

Research question: Assemble a reproducible pipeline to collect and curate posts and comments from relevant communities (e.g., Reddit)

Project details

Current opportunity

Undergraduate Research Assistant (LLMs + Social Media Analysis)UndergradRemote
Seed Project (Unfunded)Unfunded2025–2026SeedOpen for Students

A Scalable Approach to Policy Analysis

Use NLP and LLM-based techniques to analyze policy documents and legislation from state legislature sources (e.g., the National Conference of State Legislatures website), with a focus on workforce development, environmental, and energy policy.

Research question: Build a scalable ingestion pipeline for policy pages, PDFs, and bills with proper metadata

Project details

Current opportunity

Undergraduate Research Assistant (NLP for Policy Analysis)UndergradRemote
Seed Project (Unfunded)Unfunded2025–2026SeedOpen for Students

Figurative Language in Educational Contexts

Analyze transcripts from course recordings (e.g., YouTube) to identify figurative language such as metaphors and analogies used by instructors when explaining difficult or abstract concepts. Use NLP and LLMs to facilitate identification and classification.

Research question: Curate a dataset of lecture transcripts with basic metadata (discipline, level, topic)

Project details

Current opportunity

Undergraduate Research Assistant (NLP for Figurative Language)UndergradRemote
Seed Project (Unfunded)Unfunded2025–2026SeedOpen for Students

Scaffolding Student Self-Regulated Learning with Large Language Models

Use LLMs and self-regulated learning (SRL) theory to build a full-stack web app that scaffolds students across forethought, performance, and self-reflection phases (e.g., goal-setting, planning, monitoring, reflection).

Research question: Design SRL-guided workflows (goal-setting, planning, monitoring, reflection) powered by LLMs

Project details

Current opportunity

Undergraduate Research Assistant (LLMs + SRL Web App)UndergradRemote
Seed Project (Unfunded)Unfunded2025–2026SeedOpen for Students

Characterizing Design Decisions with LLMs

Use LLMs to identify design decisions and the factors that influence them from qualitative text (e.g., interviews, design notebooks, reports). One outcome is constructing causal influence diagrams that represent decisions and relationships.

Research question: Build an ingestion and extraction pipeline for design texts (interviews, logs, reports)

Project details

Current opportunity

Undergraduate Research Assistant (LLMs for Design Decisions)UndergradRemote
Seed Project (Unfunded)Unfunded2025–2026SeedOpen for Students

Using Vision Language Models to Analyze Concept Maps

Use vision language models (VLMs) to analyze concept maps and other visualizations of complex systems. One application is to study how students represent and reason about social-ecological systems in engineering design.

Research question: Develop a dataset of concept maps and other visualizations of complex systems

Project details

Current opportunity

Undergraduate Research Assistant (VLMs for Concept Maps)UndergradRemote