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 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. Anil Chacko, Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology, has received funding as a subrecipient to Florida State University to partner with Dr. Michael J. Kofler to evaluate the efficacy of sequenced Central Executive Training (CET) and Behavioral Parent Training (BPT) for children with ADHD. The project is funded by the National Institutes of Health. CET is a computerized training intervention that improves ADHD symptoms and academic functioning by improving children’s working memory abilities. BPT is a therapeutic intervention that improves family functioning and child oppositional defiant disorder symptoms by changing parenting behaviors. Their combined use is expected to provide complementary and additive benefits, particularly if CET is delivered before BPT.
Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Service, Dr. Jacob Faber, has been awarded funding from the Russell Sage Foundation to create a new, public dataset of digitized unused archival data to explore the lasting impacts of both Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) activity on racial inequality in neighborhood attainment, wealth building, and housing opportunity. The outcome will be an interactive web tool with georeferenced maps, visualizations of digitized spatial data from the maps, and data on specific, federally subsidized loans.
Assistant Professor of Special Education, Dr. Rachel Fish, received funding from the William T. Grant Foundation and the Spencer Foundation to analyze the extent to which current inferences about over- or under-representation of racially minoritized students, relative to white students, are attributable to methodological choices made by researchers. Their findings can provide more accurate evidence about the nature of racial disparities in special education, which is necessary for policymakers to design appropriate mechanisms to address these inequalities.
Dr. Gigliana Melzi, Associate Professor of Applied Psychology, has received funding with TERC from the National Science Foundation’s Racial Equity in STEM Education program to conduct an equity-informed design-based implementation research study to develop a new model for collaborating with Latinx families and early childhood educators and shape a more equitable vision of mathematics education in the preschool years. The project is a partnership between researchers, educators, and Latinx families and is led collaboratively by TERC, NYU Steinhardt, Mt. Hood Community College (MHCC) Head Start, East Harlem Bilingual (EHB) Head Start, and University of Maryland.
Doctoral student, Raquel Rose, has been awarded funding by the American Psychological Foundation to examine how school pushout and related factors impact safety and suicidality for legal system-impacted girls at high risk for mental health challenges. The project will experimentally evaluate whether and to what degree a trauma-informed advocacy intervention, called ROSES, influences system-impacted girls’ suicidality and its correlates. Dr. Shabnam Javdani, Associate Professor of Applied Psychology, will provide mentorship and guidance to Rose throughout the duration of the project.
Qingyi Grace Zhang and Victoria Monte have received funding from the Psi Chi and the Foundation for Rehabilitation Psychology, respectively to conduct research under the mentorship and supervision of Dr. William Tsai, Assistant Professor of Applied Psychology. Zhang’s work will examine the efficacy of an expressive helping intervention for reducing acculturative stress and improving psychological well-being among Chinese international students. Monte will study social support as an influential psychological construct that may be associated with psychological well-being among college students with chronic conditions.
