Voluntary Work
Volunteering your time in a research group can be an interesting and enriching alternative to volunteering for charities or other groups. As a non-paid volunteer, you would gain valuable experience in research techniques. You would also gain important insights into who real research works on a day-to-day basis. Your research supervisor is likely to be a valuable source of advice and reference letters for the future.
Volunteering can be done during the semester and during the vacations. The number of hours per week you volunteer needs to be agreed upon with the individual supervisor with whom you want to work.
If you are interested in volunteering your time on a research project, please contact those members of staff whose research is of most interest to you.
Projects currently looking for volunteers in 2009
When willow tits hide thousands of items in the autumn, the part of the brain involved in memorizing these locations is increased in size by over 10%. If you would like to help us better understand the changes underlying these changes, as well as figure out what else changes when so many memories are made and stored, please contact tom.smulders@ncl.ac.uk. The work you would be participating in would involve staining brain sections, examining them under the microscope and counting cells.
Volunteers to help with foraging experiments on birds and fieldwork on foraging by birds (including garden birds and kestrels) would be great. Contact: Mark Whittingham (m.j.whittingham@ncl.ac.uk)
