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. Rezarta Bilali, Associate Professor of Psychology and Social Intervention, and Dr. Michelle Twali, Assistant Professor, both in NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Applied Psychology, have received funding from the Russell Sage Foundation to investigate social movements as levers to educate the general public on racial struggles for civil rights and their role in challenging the dominant historical narrative. Using focus group interviews and social media analysis strategies, they investigate how activists make sense of the history of racial struggle for civil rights, and how this understanding influences ongoing activism. They also seek to identify what features of historical narratives about Black racial struggles were used by the Black Lives Matter movement to mobilize the larger public.

Dr. Jacob Faber, Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Service, and colleagues at Cornell University and the University of Virginia have been awarded funding from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth to expand his work creating a 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.

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 to study 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. Charlton McIlwain, Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, has been awarded funding from the Democracy Fund to continue to build the capacity of the Center for Critical Race + Digital Studies (CRDS).  CRDS and its network of researchers and public scholars aim to produce insight, convene conversations and collaborations to better understand the evolving landscape of race, targeted harms, and opportunities to pursue equity through digital technology. Their goal is to sustain this work long term and increasingly provide opportunities for CRDS to engage multiple public audiences, including local, state and federal policymakers and others working to shape technology in the public interest. The Center is particularly focused on activities that convene members of the CRDS network in ways that strengthen the network, amplify the collective work being produced by their members, and actively facilitate their members' ability to engage with the policy community, advocates and journalists.

Dr. Mike Hoa Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Education, has been awarded funding from the National Science Foundation to examine the educational efficacy of programs funded as Minority-Serving Institutions through a research-practice partnership (RPP) project. The RPP includes a collaboration with the Queens College AANAPISI Project (QCAP), which recently was awarded $1.75 million from the US Department of Education (ED) as an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI). Through a multiple methods design, the RPP will work collaboratively to design, implement, measure, and assess the efficacy of QCAP’s educational interventions on academic outcomes and racial identity development among Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AA&NHPI) students.

Dr. Luis A. Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Education Leadership and Policy Studies in the Department of Administration, Leadership, and Technology, has been selected as a recipient of the 2023 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship! Dr. Rodriguez will be completing a mixed methods study which will use an explanatory sequential design to investigate paraprofessional demographics and career trajectories and their ambitions to enter the teaching profession, specifically within the New York City context. The study will provide a descriptive portrait of the paraprofessional pool and identify the organizational conditions that support and impede paraprofessionals from transitioning into full-time teaching roles. For more details, visit the full IHDSC news article.

Dr. Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, Professor of Applied Psychology, has been awarded funding from the National Science Foundation to examine how the way infants engage with the people and objects in their environment influences how they learn to talk. Specifically, this study quantifies how infant vocalizations, mother speech, and infant object play are temporally structured, relate to one another, and align with infants’ phonological and word production. The temporal structure of everyday interactions—a fundamental but unstudied feature of behavior—organizes opportunities for infants to attend to, encode, forget, and integrate information as they build language skills. Dr. Tamis-LeMonda will use an audiovisual database of 400+ hours of infant-mother interactions in a large, diverse sample to investigate the timing of everyday behaviors on infant vocalization.

Dr. Angela Trude, Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Food Studies, recently partnered with Share Our Strength, a nonprofit organization committed to helping communities feed children with their No Kid Hungry campaign and addressing the root causes of hunger and poverty. Dr. Trude will contribute to Share Our Strength’s WIC Online Ordering Communications Toolkit Project by supporting data-gathering and development of messages to support the WIC online ordering experience.

Jessica Huancacuri-Harlo, doctoral student and advisee of Dr. Gigliana Melzi, has received funding as a subrecipient to the University of Michigan to study Indigenous perspectives on young children’s early math learning. The project is funded by the Mellon Foundation. European colonization has led to the loss of Indigenous ways of thinking, doing, and being. As a result, Western European perspectives dominate our knowledge of children’s development, particularly that related to young children's math learning. To build an equitable understanding of early math learning, researchers must expand existing normative views to include Indigenous perspectives. To that aim, this study will describe Quechua Runa caregivers' math-related beliefs and practices in the larger context of their perspective on children's learning. Two-generations of caregivers will be interviewed to share their thoughts and feelings about mathematics, and how they support children’s math learning.