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We are building a program to support students and CNRI mentors. We are currently in need of graduate student and postdoctoral mentors from the Duke CCN and Psychology and Neuroscience Department for Spring 2024. We are particularly interested in recruiting first- and second-year PhD students! Please email the graduate student mentor representative, Kevin O’Neill, if you are interested in learning more!


Some benefits of this role include:

Becoming a better mentor As a CNRI mentor, you gain teaching, mentoring, and management experience in a supportive, team-based, environment. We take a team-based approach to mentorship: you work with another graduate student (or post-doc) to mentor your students and we all come together once a week to discuss progress, best practices, and address challenges as a group.

Demonstrating your commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion  This program is designed to increase the accessibility of research opportunities at Duke. By democratizing the recruiting process and prioritizing student growth as the main qualification for acceptance into the program, we hope to increase diversity of students involved in research at Duke.

Gain skilled and engaged RAs We’re combining our expertise to create (and continually improve) a standardized methodology for teaching undergraduate students the necessary skills to conduct research in psychology and neuroscience. This creates an opportunity for engaged, well-trained, students to get involved in your research for several years!


Graduate students and post-docs at Duke can get involved in a variety of ways: 

Become a research mentor   We pair students and mentors off into teams of four (2 mentors and 2 mentees). The goal of these project teams is to get mentees involved in a variety of research processes from stimuli design to data collection to data analysis. The research mentor position is a semester long investment and involves holding weekly team meetings with mentees, designing structured tasks for your interns, and providing a lens into graduate-level research is like. We strongly encourage research mentors to get involved regardless of where they are in their own research process; our team-based approach ensures that interns can get involved in research even as our own work ebbs and flows.

Become a lecturer We’ve designed an entire curriculum to support the growth of our interns as researchers. As a team, we administer a twelve-week course that includes an introduction to cognitive neuroscience concepts, journal clubs, career chats, and a semester-long team project where the interns design and program their own experiment. Leading a lecture or journal club involves preparing a 75 minute lecture and discussion around a topic or method in cognitive neuroscience.

Become a part of our leadership team – Each semester, we are eager to expand our reach, improve our undergraduate programming, and optimize our graduate mentor experience. Graduate students and post-docs that want to shape our program and guide its growth can join our leadership team.


We work with CNRI mentors to find a role (or a combination of roles) that works best for your availability and professional development goals! Reach out to get involved!