In spring and summer 2018, the department awarded 7 of our undergraduate majors small grants of up to $500 each to support their involvement in research projects and community service internships. Made possible by a generous anonymous donor, Undergraduate Research and Service Grants and larger Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowships for 2018-2019 will be available to all psychology and cognitive neuroscience majors (see https://psychology.columbian.gwu.edu/funding-research). These awards aim to help students pursue and advance their careers—and they did just that, as illustrated by these comments:
“Looking at these results [on whether a sense of meaning in life was related to the adjustment of undergraduate veterans] and seeing something similar to what I predicted was an extremely validating moment for me. That is, finding strong significant correlations with such limited data reinforced my original intuitions that this topic was worth studying in depth”—Jack Venezia
[After a semester going on calls with DC police officers as an intern] “When I said I wanted to work in law enforcement, the officers took me seriously and took the time to explain MPD policies and procedures as they worked, answered all of my questions and gave me incredible career advice that I definitely would not have gotten elsewhere. I learned so much this semester and am now considering several different career options that I would not have even thought to consider had I not done this program”—Katie Allison
The spring 2018 winners and their projects were:
Katie Allison: Funds covered transportation costs for her work in domestic violence and other areas with the Metropolitan Police Department; this was in conjunction with Dr. Sharon Lambert’s Psyc 3592 Field Internship course.
Ashley Cheng: Work-study funding allowed her to learn to program in Python and develop and conduct a study in Dr. Sarah Shomstein’s lab on how semantic knowledge affects visual attention.
Jacqueline Mai: Transportation funding allowed her to serve as a research assistant at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS) Laboratory for the Treatment of Suicide-related Ideation and Behavior. Jackie transcribed audio files of therapy sessions and interviews with clinicians and chaplains, compiled and distributed weekly lists of suicide-related abstracts, assisted in literature reviews, and maintained files on participant recruitment. Her Psyc 3591 Supervised Research experience was co-mentored by Margaret Baer of USUHS and Dr. Carol Sigelman.
John “Jack” Venezia: With funds to give incentives to additional research participants, Jack worked on graduate student Meagan Ryan’s dissertation research in Dr. Rohrbeck’s lab and carried out his own study of how “meaning of life" moderates associations between trauma exposure and mental health outcomes among undergraduate veterans.
The summer 2018 winners and their projects were:
Jared Axelowitz was the first ever winner of our new Psychology Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship but because he also won a $5,000 Luther Rice Undergraduate Research fellowship from Columbian College, his award from Psychology was restricted to $500. Jared worked with mentor Dr. Cindy Rohrbeck on two studies aimed at preventing sexual violence by increasing the self-efficacy of bystanders to it to do more than just stand by.
Isabel Griffin’s grant allow her to work with Dr. John Philbeck to develop a new method of testing distance perception using virtual reality technology in order to study how exposure to the context in which an object will appear affects judgments of the distance of the object from the viewer.
Nir Liebenthal, who also scored a Luther Rice Undergraduate Research Fellowship, received a Psychology URSG grant to support his exploratory study, mentored by Dr. Sherry Molock, of whether parents of high school athletes know what they should about concussions and procedures for dealing with them.
Congratulations to all!
