November 2025 | Engineering Opportunities in the LAMP Lab
Are you an engineering student looking to apply your technical skills in a hands-on research environment? The LAMP Lab at Mizzou is inviting students with interests in device design, programming, and system testing to join our interdisciplinary team and collaborate with us on developing innovative tools for psychology research.
We’ve already started building our own custom systems — including a liquid-delivery device based on Arduino architecture that interfaces with psychology and neuroscience-specific software. It’s been a powerful tool, but there’s room to grow — from increasing its delivery capacity and long-term stability to making it more user-friendly and reliable for repeated research use.
Now, we’re looking for engineering partners who want to help us refine existing designs and prototype new ones. Future projects include creating an olfactory stimulus device, developing methods to measure and verify precise stimulus timing, and building response collection systems such as proximity and posture detectors or analog input devices.
These systems are essential for studying how people respond to tastes, smells, movements, and other sensory cues — allowing us to ask complex psychological questions about perception, motivation, and behavior with exacting precision and control. Some projects will even involve unique technical challenges, like ensuring devices are MRI-compatible, safe, and durable enough for repeated use in human research.
This is a great opportunity to gain real-world experience in prototype development, hardware/software integration, and human-subject research applications, while contributing to the technology that powers behavioral science.
For the right candidate and project fit, paid opportunities may be available.
If you’re excited by the idea of building devices that help us understand how the brain responds to the world, we’d love to hear from you! Email mulamplab@missouri.edu with subject line “Engineering” to learn more about how to get involved.