For Students
Work with Our JustScience Lab
The Wilson Center is committed to helping build a new generation of leaders to face the challenges of mass incarceration and injustice in our criminal legal system. We work with students from a wide range of disciplines, including undergraduates, law students, public policy students, and others across campus through our JustScience Lab. The JustScience Lab is a program that runs throughout the year providing research assistantships as well as summer internships.
As part of the JustScience Lab, Duke students work with experts in the field of criminal justice to help research key problems and craft real-world solutions to major issues affecting our legal system. These are paid positions where students work 5-10 hours per week during the academic year and up to 40 hours per week in the summer, depending on the project and the student.
- We expect to have limited positions for students available during the summer of 2025. If you are interested in being considered for a position with the JustScience Lab this summer, please fill out this interest form.
- If you are interested in working with the JustScience Lab during the 2025-2026 academic year, please fill out this interest form. We typically reach out to interested students for the fall semester in August/early September, and in December/early January for the spring semester. Each semester, we receive more applications than we can accommodate, which means we aren’t able to offer positions to everyone who applies.
- Please note that there are currently no open positions with the JustScience Lab for Spring 2025.
Former interns and research assistants have had the opportunity to improve prosecution and bail practices and prevent wrongful convictions. They have presented and published research and policy reports, as well as contributed to legal amicus briefs and clemency petitions. Here are just a few previous projects:
- Scripting in the R language to combine four databases made public by the NC Department of Adult Correction, which allows researchers to gain deeper insights into imprisonment and sentencing in North Carolina, including what types of people go to prison, why they go to prison, and how long they spend in prison.
- Researching best practices for improving housing accessibility and affordability for justice-involved individuals and drafting two memos for Durham Mayor Elaine O’Neal on this topic at her request.
- Assisting with an amicus brief in collaboration with The Innocence Project in support of an appeal filed by a client currently on Nevada Death Row.
“The Wilson Center has afforded me the opportunity to gain familiarity with the legal system to a degree inaccessible to most undergraduates. I also gained several mentors, who were eager to share their knowledge and expertise with me, and was introduced to professors and staff at Duke Law who are now supporting me on my own journey to law school. The Center has largely defined my undergraduate career and is the reason I want to pursue a career in the legal field. The Wilson Center is responsible for extremely important work and driving necessary change in the system, and I am very fortunate to have been a part of the team.”
— Sydney LaPine, Duke ’24, Duke Law ‘27
If you are interested in learning about new opportunities with the JustScience Lab and attending the Wilson Center’s events, please sign up for our mailing list for students!