Overview

During most years, the 2DML Lab offers an undergraduate summer research project, which are more common in fields like physics and computer science. They take place during the summer break for undergraduate programmes (June to August), are unfunded and not for credit, and meant specifically for students between their third and fourth year who wish to gain research experience. If done excellently, these projects also have the potential to be further refined into a publication.

Eligibility

Students are in their third year of one of three programmes; Business with Decision Analytics, Business and Economics, or Business with Strategic Economics, and have taken at least one course each in programming (like BUST08039) and statistics at level 10 or above (such as BUST10133). These projects take place in-person, with regular meetings in that period, and are not available remotely.

Deadline

Students interested in a project should reach out via email to the respective advisor before the 1st of May for a given year to schedule a meeting; earlier contact is encouraged, as each project is limited to one student. If the project is allocated before the deadline, it will be marked as unavailable.

2026 project: Pandemic impacts on crime and recovery: Socioeconomic deprivation and vulnerability in Chicago (advisor: Ben Moews, ben.moews@ed.ac.uk)  [available] 

Description: The COVID-19 pandemic affected many aspects of life, including the spatial distribution and frequency of different crime types during prevention policy measures. The objective of this project is to investigate the interactions of COVID-19 crime impacts and socioeconomic factors. As such, the project has a methodological focus on spatial statistics and time series analysis, with options such as cluster analysis as part of unsupervised machine learning. Students will be provided with fine-grained spatio-temporal data on crime incident reports for the City of Chicago, while socioeconomic hardship data is available through the American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.