Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) provides UMD students of all backgrounds, disciplines, and levels of experience with the opportunity to engage in scaffolded, multidisciplinary team-based projects.
VIP Team Information
VIP Team
Researching Innovative Tools for Meaningful Digital Engagement
VIP Faculty Mentors:
Dr. Ronald Yaros
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
Meeting Location, Day & Time:
3200 Knight Hall, Fridays, 1:00pm-3:00pm.
Description:
Many people avoid important information—not because they don’t care, but because it isn’t tailored to how they need and process it.
Join the Digital Engagement Lab Fridays from 1 to 3 to address one of today’s biggest challenges: how to reach diverse audiences who scroll past critical information about health, science, climate, and society.
In this lab, you won’t just study media—you’ll help shape its future. You’ll work on real projects that:
Transform traditional content into interactive, mobile-first experiences
Use AI to understand how people actually engage
Scrape and analyze information using our direct access to TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook data
Design new ways to present information so it is seen, understood, and remembered
Students collaborate across disciplines to design, prototype, and test next-generation content using our research-driven Digital Engagement Model—a theoretical framework already being applied to real-world communication challenges.
Whether you want to code, design, analyze data, or understand human behavior, this lab gives you the opportunity to create and test tools that make information matter.
Methods:
Students gain hands-on experience with approaches that power modern digital systems:
Generative AI to summarize, restructure, and personalize content
Machine learning & data analysis to identify patterns in user behavior
Data visualization to make complex information instantly understandable
Experimental design & statistics to test what actually works
Mobile-first design to build experiences for real-world attention spans
You won’t just learn methods—you’ll apply them to real problems with measurable outcomes.
Majors:
This lab is intentionally interdisciplinary to reflect the complexity of modern communication. Students from all majors are welcome, including:
Computer Science / Data Science
Information Science
Psychology / Cognitive Science
Public Health / Health Communication
Business / Marketing / Analytics
Journalism / Media / Communication
Education / Learning Sciences
If your field involves people, data, or communication, there is a role for you here.
Preferred Interests:
We are looking for team members who are:
Curious about how people think, choose, and engage
Interested in AI, data, media, or design
Motivated to work on real-world problems with real impact
Willing to collaborate across disciplines and skill levels
You do not need to know everything coming in.
You just have to be committed to learning, contributing, and building something new.