Building Research Leaders: A New Model for Empowering Undergraduates to Strengthen Research Teams
UW–Madison’s Center for Research on Complex Thinking Boosts Research Capacity, Student Skills
April 9, 2026 | By Karen Rivedal, Office of Research & Scholarship
CRCT's Associate Director of Research Brendan Eagan
At the Center for Research on Complex Thinking (CRCT) in UW–Madison's School of Education, undergraduates routinely perform at a graduate-student level and help train faculty and researchers from around the world, said Brendan Eagan, CRCT's associate director of research, in a recent presentation.
That outcome is no accident. Eagan described it as the product of a deliberate, distributed leadership model that treats undergraduates as collaborators, mentors, and culture-shapers, rather than just assistants.
His talk, titled “Fostering Distributed Leadership: A Model for Undergraduate Success in Research,” offered campus colleagues a detailed look at how CRCT builds and sustains this model, and how other research teams can adapt it. Undergraduate Michelle Bandiera also shared her ongoing experience as a senior research intern at CRCT, describing several practices that sustain the model.
Why Undergraduates Are Central to CRCT’s Work
Based at the school's Wisconsin Center for Education Research, CRCT is a home for researchers, curriculum designers, software developers and others who work in a range of fields from health and health care to curriculum, simulation, and analytical tool development. From this larger portfolio, one main focus of CRCT’s research sits within the fast-growing field of quantitative ethnography (QE), launched by CRCT Director David Williamson Shaffer in 2017 as a new method of data analysis that unifies statistical rigor with qualitative findings to understand complex human activities and patterns. The center now supports a global QE community and runs a year-long QE Fellows Institute that trains early- and mid-career researchers.
Undergraduates play a key role in all of it — helping to build pilot analyses, support workshops, consult with researchers, and manage logistics for large training programs. Their work is foundational to the institute and CRCT’s broader capacity.
“Undergraduates are a force multiplier,” Eagan said. “They let us do things we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. But high expectations only work when they’re paired with high levels of support.”
CRCT’s experimental and intentional professional practices led members of the center to rethink how research teams should be structured. Instead of treating students as temporary helpers, CRCT uses a distributed leadership model that positions them as leaders, mentors, and co-constructors of the lab’s culture. While they have found this model to be successful, it requires structures and practices that enable learning about, and buying into, a complex professional culture, rather than thinking of undergraduates solely as labor or people with needed skills to complete a list of tasks.
Eagan compared the challenge to coaching a top-tier college basketball team: players cycle through quickly, but the culture and systems must remain strong enough to sustain excellence.
Undergraduate research teams face similar turnover, with students typically staying for only one to two years at most. CRCT has found that with the right structures and professional culture, a changing cast of students can still expand what the center can accomplish.
Structures That Support Student Leadership
Eagan and Bandiera described several practices that sustain CRCT’s model:
· Weekly one-on-one meetings focus on professional development, feedback, and aligning tasks with students’ goals. Bandiera said these conversations helped her discover her interest in research and prepare for graduate school.
· Weekly intern meetings create space for peer feedback, shared problem solving, and 360-degree management, in which students support supervisors, peers, and newer interns.
· Matching projects to skills and interests keeps morale high and encourages ownership.
· Introduction to new skills and challenges to help students find new interests and strengths.
· Early and authentic ownership gives undergraduates responsibility for leading projects, training faculty during institutes, and even helping hire their successors.
· A culture of care pairs high expectations with high support, emphasizing well-being and mutual aid.
· Passing the baton ensures that graduating interns train the next cohort, preserving institutional knowledge.
The result is a team in which undergraduates often perform beyond expectations. External partners mistake them for graduate students, and many CRCT alumni go on to graduate school or competitive industry roles at places including Google, Amazon, RAND, and the Federal Reserve.
How Distributed Leadership Works
Three short anecdotes illustrated how CRCT develops undergraduate leaders:
· An intern highly skilled in programming was disengaged from the culture of the group and struggling to integrate successfully with collaborative efforts. This led to a discussion with Eagan that helped him see how the intern could connect his work in the center to his skills and future goals. After gaining confidence — including through an internship at Amazon — the student returned as a strong believer in and advocate for the group’s professional practices.
· An undergrad who defended the lab’s norms during a meeting demonstrated how students can at times uphold and articulate the culture more effectively than supervisors. This moment led CRCT to formalize the role of senior research interns.
· A high-performing intern who grew frustrated with her peers not working up to her expectations learned to shift from judgment to leadership, focusing on how to help others improve their performance. This reframing strengthened the team and helped her grow as a leader.
These stories underscored the principles behind CRCT’s model: align work with interests, empower students to co-construct culture, and challenge high performers to support the team.
“We’re not just getting labor from folks,” Eagan said. “We’re trying to help them cultivate confidence and strong professional identity.”
In this way, distributed leadership benefits both the research enterprise and the students. It also aligns with UW–Madison’s mission as a public research university committed to developing future scholars and professionals. Eagan closed by inviting colleagues to reflect on how undergraduates might contribute meaningfully to their own projects and offered to continue the conversation with anyone interested in adapting CRCT’s model.
