The IHDSC Faculty and Research Affiliate community leverages interdisciplinary expertise and partnerships in education, health and healthcare, social and human development, economics, and more to create new knowledge and spark meaningful social change. We invite you to join us in celebrating the recent funding awards received by members of our community. We are thrilled to provide support to these talented and impactful research teams that share our commitment to unraveling inequality and expanding opportunity.

Dr. Karen Adolph, Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, and colleagues at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine received renewal funding from the National Institutes of Health to understand how the neurohormone oxytocin promotes parental care and social interactions by acting on various brain regions and neuron types. The study analyzes the socio-spatial behavior of mice. Dr. Adolph will serve as a subaward on the project and will work with the project team to adapt Databrary for inclusion of mouse behavioral videos. Databrary was established in 2014 by Dr. Adolph and her team. It is a restricted access data library that is specialized for storing, streaming, and sharing video and audio recordings collected as research data or documentation.

Dr. Natalie Brito, Associate Professor of Applied Psychology, has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to support the rigorous application and validation of remote infant testing methodology of early cognitive development when infants are 4, 8, and 12-month of age. Use of remote data collection approaches in developmental research has increased significantly, in part due to in-person data collection stoppage that occurred at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. These kinds of data collection methods are likely to decrease barriers to participation for families, increase sample diversity, and could potentially address common problems in the field related to statistical power and sampling bias, all significant issues associated with construct and ecological validity. The project will be completed in partnership with the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Dr. Brito also received funding from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) to establish an interdisciplinary collaboration with Dr. Tomás Ryan at Trinity College Dublin to support the validation of remote data collection of early attention and memory skills during infancy. Remote methodologies may not be appropriate for evaluating every cognitive domain. Dr. Brito and Dr. Ryan will look specifically at visual attention, which is one of the earliest observable behaviors to develop in children. Visual attention underlies most, if not all higher-order cognitive skills including memory and is one of the earliest markers of risk for future neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and ADHD. 

Dr. Elise Cappella, Vice Provost for University-wide Initiatives and Graduate Education and Professor of Applied Psychology, continues her long standing partnership with the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Mental Health to train master’s level clinicians to serve as Behavioral Consultants in the BRIDGE model for effective and sustained implementation of BRIDGE across K-5 and K-8 Philadelphia schools. UPenn received funding from the Community Behavioral Health and has subcontracted to New York University for supervision and assistance from the BRIDGE developers to support the improvement, implementation, and monitoring of BRIDGE across the School District of Philadelphia.

Dr. Thomas Hill, Clinical Professor at the Center for Global Affairs at the NYU School of Professional Studies and Director of the Peace Research and Education Program, has been awarded funding from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to launch a nationwide peace studies network in Iraq for higher education and civil society actors that would serve as a model for establishment of a similar global network with partner organizations in all of the UNDP’s regions. The network would serve as a mechanism for creating and disseminating quality standards in peacebuilding education as well as a platform for exploring and sharing foundational peace research and educational materials – particularly those produced by UNDP’s Prevention Academy – that could then be contextualized by network members in each region. 

Dr. Tatiana Homonoff, Associate Professor of Economics and Public Service, along with colleagues from the University of California - San Diego have received funding from the Russell Sage Foundation’s Presidential Authority Fund for additional funds to support an ongoing study of the effect of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on financial health. Their project is the first to link the newly-available University of California Consumer Credit Panel (UC-CCP) data to administrative SNAP enrollment data from the California Department of Social Services (CDSS). They will use experimental and quasi-experimental empirical approaches to estimate the causal effect of the program on financial outcomes, as well as examine the effect of several barriers to SNAP participation, such as complex application and recertification processes, and eligibility requirements.

Dr. Erin Godfrey, Director of IHDSC and Associate Professor of Applied Psychology, and Dr. Shabnam Javdani, Associate Professor of Applied Psychology, have been awarded funding from the New York State Unified Court System to deliver and scale ROSES, an evidence-based gender-responsive direct service program proven effective as a diversion, prevention and intervention response for girls involved in the juvenile justice system. Primary funding for this project comes from the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Dr. Gigliana Melzi, Professor of Applied Psychology, has received funding from the Heising-Simons Foundation to study and launch a professional development packet designed to build the capacity of community-based organizations and agencies in Northern California interested in providing early math professional development to home-based childcare providers working with young Latine children. The project leverages an existing partnership between Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education (DREME) and Grail Family Services (GFS). The study will be conducted with Dr. Nydia Prishker, Assistant Professor of Childhood Education at St. Thomas Aquinas College. 

Dr. Pamela Morris-Perez of NYU Steinhardt’s ARCADIA for Suicide Prevention and Professor of Psychology and Social Intervention received funding from William T. Grant Foundation’s President’s Initiative to supplement ongoing work in partnership with Directing Change to examine the efficacy of a novel school-based mental health and suicide prevention program at Directing Change that can be a catalyst for changing norms for suicide prevention school- and community-wide. In Directing Change students create 30- or 60-second films in mental health/suicide prevention and disseminate them to the school community. By following film submission guidelines, students learn about suicide prevention and mental health, discuss and apply that knowledge, and communicate youth-oriented, positive, action-oriented messages to peers.

Dr. A. Jordan Wright, Clinical Associate Professor of Applied Psychology and Director of the NYU Center for Counseling and Community Wellbeing (CCCW), has partnered with the Southern Smoke Foundation to provide high-quality psychotherapy services to food and beverage employees in the state of New York. CCCW’s training and therapeutic model is aligned with APA’s Evidence-Based Practice (EBP), employing the best available research supported techniques (including cognitive-behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and acceptance and commitment therapy), but tailored to the specific cultural and personal needs of the clients themselves.