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Vestibular Research Lab

Join the Lab

Interested in joining the Lab?
Use the following information to apply!

How to Join

We are always looking for motivated undergraduate and graduate students to join the lab! If you are interested in joining us as an undergraduate student, please read through the following frequently asked questions.

If you are interested in joining us as a graduate student, please apply through the psychology department (https://psychology.byu.edu/graduate) or the neuroscience center (https://neuroscience.byu.edu/prospective-graduate-students) during the next application cycle.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • We are a group of individuals who share a common interest in discovering deeper insights of brain and vestibular system function, particularly on a circuit and systems level of analysis. Beyond our individual interests, working and socializing together has also made us a friendly mesh of lives, hoping to support one another in current and future aspirations. The vestibular system is fundamental to many of our daily activities, though it’s often unrecognized as such. We’re hoping that our research can provide a foundation for future translational work that could help people with debilitating vestibular problems. As for brain transplants, it’s a pretty cool idea, but we prefer to study something useful while we wait for reality to catch up with science fiction.

  • If you just want a taste of how current research is done to satisfy your curiosity, you could probably get that in an hour a week. If you want to develop functional skills, either in bench techniques, experimental assays, or computational analyses, that will require a larger investment of hours. Most students generally find that 5-10 hours a week helps them make real progress on a specific project. If you want to take a project all the way from design to publication, it will likely require not more hours per week (difficult to do with other responsibilities), but rather a longer-term commitment, something like working in the lab over two-plus years. With that said, there is no minimum number of hours required to be part of the lab—everyone has to start somewhere, and we want people to feel like they can investigate if this is lab a good fit for them before committing a big chunk of valuable time.

  • As alluded to above, there are different levels of outcomes based on level of work input. The most basic is a more informed worldview that can help make challenges less stressful and the future look brighter. Practically, working in the lab will also help you identify whether research is something you’d like to pursue professionally. You could also develop hands-on skills, like in vivo/in vitro electrophysiology, behavioral testing, optogenetic stimulation, cryosectioning, immunohistochemistry, coding, figure preparation, manuscript preparation, and so forth. Whatever future career you’re interested in pursuing, working in the lab would also give Dr. Stay the chance to know you and write you a recommendation letter. Those who are highly committed could submit and publish their work, which is highly desirable for pre-professional applicants (e.g. medical school, dental, PhD programs, business, law). Finally, working in the lab could provide research credit or even payment, depending on your situation.

  • Dr. Stay has some broad project foci (see Projects page), but there is likely space for your own question as well! Generally students starting off learn the basic lab techniques, and in doing so get the chance to see how their question could relate to the current studies going on the lab. Dr. Stay will meet individually with students to discuss how to develop a project, including finding relevant background literature and what types of techniques would be necessary for successfully answering the question. Once a project idea is fleshed out, it can be submitted as an amendment to the research protocol, and once approved is open for preliminary data collection. The preliminary data is then used on grant applications that can fund the entire project over a consistently long time period. Finally, after data collection and analysis, the results are submitted for publication!

  • Email Dr. Stay with your interest and initial expectations. If it seems like a good match, come observe in the lab for a couple of weeks, both in coming to weekly lab meeting and watching actual experiments. If you are still interested, you have the chance to take a research course (Psych 492R or Neuro 449R) for psych or neuro academic credit, respectively, or apply for internal BYU funding to get paid real money. We have an onboarding document that walks you through step-by-step.