2022 Workshop

2022 Workshop

The Fragile Families Data Workshop was held June 22-24, 2022, at Columbia University in New York City. The 2022 workshop introduced researchers to FFCWS contextual data. 

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Jasmine Alli

Jasmine Alli is a second-year clinical psychology doctoral student in the Youth Rising Lab at Texas A&M University. From Arlington, TX and received her Bachelor of Arts from The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests focus on trauma exposure and its impact on depression and anxiety among racial minority youth as well as resilience and other protective factors.

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Lorenzo Benavides

Lorenzo Benavides has just finished his first year in the PH.D program. He is a Ph.D. student in the Social Welfare program at Ohio State University. He is specifically interested in researching the underlining elements that hinder healthy growth and development in abused and neglected children. In conjunction with this interest, he is also interested in studying the intersectionality of hospital-based providers and their role in servicing victims that have experienced some form of violence These research interests are an accumulation of his scholarly pursuits and his professional experience. He holds over six years of experience working at top-tier hospitals as a medical social worker. As a medical social worker, he has worked in units pertaining to physical trauma inflicted by others or the natural world. He has also worked in the emergency department and works to stabilize his patients' emotional and mental well-being. His research and professional pursuits make him a valuable asset to social work.

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Deaweh Benson

Deaweh Benson is a doctoral student in the Developmental Psychology program at the University of Michigan. Her work examines the effects of structural racism on health outcomes among Black youth during the transition to adulthood. Deaweh examines biological indicators (e.g. brain structure and function) to investigate potential biological embedding of structural racism. Deaweh also employs radical healing frameworks to identify factors and processes that promote wellness and transformative justice. Deaweh’s research is grounded in Black feminist theory, critical consciousness, and positive youth development frameworks. Deaweh earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Spelman College and her Master of Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has worked in academic institutions and research organizations where she investigated college student academic success, school-to-work transitions, and developmental supports for young adults.

 

Keisha Clark, PhD

Keisha Clark, PhD is an Assistant Professor of American Ethnic Studies in the Department of Social Transformation Studies at Kansas State University. Dr. Clark’s research is focused on Black sexuality and the empowerment of Black families and individuals. More recently, her work has primarily focused on Black mothering in the United States. Additionally, Dr. Clark prides herself on the application and integration of her research into the community. 

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Robyn Douglas 

Robyn Douglas is clinical psychology doctoral graduate student at Texas A&M University. She is a member of the Youth Rising Lab under the mentorship of Dr. Noni Gaylord-Harden. As a developing scholar-activist, she is interested in investigating prosocial factors such as civic participation and critical action, as well as socio-political development such as critical conciousness and community socilization, as protective/healing factors for trauma exposed Black and Brown youth from disadvantaged communities. Robyn is a recipient of the A&M Aviles-Johnson and Search Institute doctoral fellowships. She enjoys going to concerts, traveling, writing poems/stories, and volunteering for mutual aid organizations in her hometown, Houston, Texas

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Carol Duh-Leong

Carol Duh-Leong, MD, MPP is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and a KL2 clinician-investigator scholar at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She studies the social determinants of growth and development in the first 1000 days of life, with a focus on early child obesity. As a general pediatrician, she also delivers primary care to children at Bellevue Hospital Center. She completed her Academic General Pediatrics/Population Health Scholars fellowship at NYU, and her residency and chief residency in Social Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore

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Erin Eife

Erin Eife is currently a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in their Department of Sociology and the Justice Lab. In 2021, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is primarily interested in the criminal legal system and how it acts as a stratifying mechanism for citizenship rights in the United States. Using the theoretical lens of “carceral citizenship,” her work illustrates how people with connections to the criminal legal system experience an alternate form of citizenship which denies them basic rights and resources. She has explored this topic through two major threads: the experience of pretrial release and the relationship between race, class, and the criminal legal system. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, ACLS/Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Some of her work can be found in Punishment & SocietyLaw & Social InquirySocial Currents, and the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, and Trauma.  Using Fragile Families Data, she will explore the impact of pretrial release on health outcomes

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Sharbari Ganguly

Sharbari Ganguly is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass). Her research interests include medical Sociology and mental health. She is focusing her dissertation on the impact of family instability on children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors considering the potential mediating and moderating factors, such as parental stress, parenting behavior, family’s SES, other moderating factors such as child disability status. Currently she is working as a Graduate Research Assistant at Center for Social Development and Education (CSDE- UMass Boston). At CSDE Sharbari is investigating the positive impact of participation in Interscholastic Unified Special Olympic on the social and emotional skills of students with and without intellectual disabilities. She is focusing on designing pre-season and post-season survey measures for the student participants on Interscholastic Unified Sports teams. Sharbari brings her extensive qualitative and quantitative research experiences in various aspects of Social Sciences. In her M.A in Aging Studies at Eastern Illinois University, she investigated the level of grief, loss and stress burden of spouse caregivers of patients diagnosed with young onset dementia through various quantitative measures. She has done extensive qualitative research analysis for her M.Phil in Sociology and M.A. in Political Science thesis in the area of mental health where she conducted fieldwork and interviewed respondents from various adult age groups in India. Along with her research experience, Sharbari has several years of undergraduate teaching experience. Her achievements include recipient of the Transdisciplinary Dissertation Proposal Development Grant for exploratory research t UMASS Boston and Distinguish International Student Award at Eastern Illinois University.

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Rachel Ghosh

Rachel Ghosh is a third-year doctoral student in Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland, working with Dr. Natasha Cabrera. She received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan, with a minor in Community Action and Social Change. Her research interests center on father-child relationships and the impacts of father involvement on children’s social, emotional, and intellectual development throughout the lifespan - particularly in low-income, ethnic minority families. She is also interested in interventions and policy that promote healthy development and resilience among low-income children, as well as family wellbeing and functioning.

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Quinn Hendershot

Quinn Hendershot is a rising 3rd year in Binghamton University's clinical psychology PhD program.  Her research interests center around the role of culture in determining intimate relationship functioning and outcomes, as well as translation methodology and cross-cultural measurement equivalence. In her free time, Quinn enjoys hiking and playing with her many pets.

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Veronica Eva Helms Garrison

Veronica Eva Helms Garrison is a government researcher with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development & Research, Office of Research, Evaluation, and Monitoring. Mrs. Garrison leads in-house research initiatives focused on substandard housing and housing as a social determinant of health using data linkage approaches. Prior to joining HUD in 2014 as a Presidential Management Fellow during the Obama administration, Veronica was a Program Manager at the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs (AMCHP). She received a Master of Public Health from the George Washington University in 2013. In addition to her role at HUD, Veronica is also a part-time Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) candidate in the health equity and social justice (HESJ) concentration at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Natalia Langham

Natalia Langham is from the south suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. They are currently in the second year of their Sociology master’s degree at Ball State University where they also earned a Bachelor's of Science in Anthropology with a focus on African American Studies. They are currently interning at Ball State’s Office of Inclusive Excellence with their institutional research team.  Their research interests are Afro-Latinx race relations, intimate partner violence, education, and family.

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Kaitlyn Larkin

Kaitlyn Larkin is a graduate student in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program at Northern Illinois University. She is interested in studying individual-, familial- and community-level risk (e.g., economic stress, high rates of violence) and protective factors (e.g., social support, parental resilience, community connectedness) of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) with the goal of informing interventions that mitigate negative consequences associated with ACE exposure. Kaitlyn is currently utilizing the Fragile Families dataset for her master’s thesis. She plans to explore the relationship between ACEs and psychosocial outcomes (e.g., internalizing and externalizing behaviors; anxiety, depression, delinquency) and physical health outcomes (e.g., BMI, sleep) in adolescence. 

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Sarah Laurent

Sarah Laurent is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health. She is currently a second-year Epidemiology PhD student, and earned her MPH in Biostatistics from the Zilber School of Public Health. Her research interests focus on studying the effects of environmental and social exposures, particularly neighborhood exposures, on health outcomes among marginalized groups using interdisciplinary collaboration.

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Qingyang Liu

Qingyang Liu is a doctoral student in Human Development and Family Science at Syracuse University. Her research emphasizes the developmental trajectory of self-regulation within and across the cognitive, social, and emotional domains from early childhood through adolescence. She is particularly interested in how risk and protective factors contribute to individual developmental pathways in self-regulation within risky contexts. 

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Hannah Mangum

Hannah Mangum is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University and a ’21 GRFP Fellow with the National Science Foundation. She is currently in residence in Los Angeles and will be starting as a visiting researcher at UCLA Sociology in the Fall. Her work centers around family structure, social networks, higher education, and life course trajectory for youth in the United States foster care system. She is in the beginning stages of a project with her advisor, Dr. Christine Percheski, concerning parental separation and outcomes for children utilizing the Fragile Families data set.

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Brenda Mathias

Brenda Mathias is a PhD Candidate in Social Welfare at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the influence of urban spaces on adolescent well-being, CBPR methods, and asset-based community development. Brenda currently serves as a pre-doctoral fellow with SOULLAB, working with BIPOC communities to harness the power of technology as an advocacy and organizing tool. Prior to attending Berkeley, Brenda managed several randomized control trials evaluating youth summer jobs in Philadelphia. She has worked on community-led revitalization efforts in Cleveland, and conducted service coordination in Philadelphia public schools. Brenda holds a bachelors from Temple University and a masters from Case Western Reserve.

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Lauren McNeela

Lauren McNeela is a doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology at Northern Illinois University. Her research interests include the development of psychopathology in children and adolescents, with a specific focus on examining the impact of systems-level contextual factors (e.g., family, neighborhood) in low-resourced communities. She uses a trauma-informed lens to examine risk and protective factors across development.

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Yolunda Nabors

Yolunda Nabors, Senior Lecturer of economics at Tennessee Tech University, received her Bachelor of Business Administration from Mississippi State University, Master of Arts Degree in Economics from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Economics from Jones College of Business at Middle Tennessee State University.  Ms. Nabors is a passionate educator who seeks to inspire and engage her students in all things economics through an enthusiastic pedagogy. In addition to teaching, Yolunda performs economic impact studies for clients of the university.

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Matthew Ogan

Matthew Ogan is a doctoral student in Human Development and Family Science at the University of Missouri. His research agenda examines the causes and consequences of romantic relationship instability, with a particular focus on the social contexts in which couples are embedded. More specifically, his research seeks to understand the impacts of low-income hardships on romantic relationships, and interventions or social policies which might buffer these effects.

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Yangjin Park

Yangjin Park’s research interests include violence and trauma, mental health, and family therapy.His research benefited from using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. His work aims to reduce violence and trauma among vulnerable families. He received the Diane Greenstein Award from New York University. Yangjin Park is expected to work at the University of Texas at Arlington as a tenure-track assistant professor starting in July 2022.

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Collin Perryman

Collin Perryman is a PhD candidate in Education Administration at the University of South Carolina, where they have a focus in the sociology and history of education and a focus in public health. They are affiliated with the Office for the Study of Aging at the Arnold School of Public Health. Generally, they study the education and health of Black people—through a critical race approach. Currently, they research the relationship between school policing and the mental health of Black students, the relationship between desegregation and the cognitive health of older Black adults, and the relationship between school discipline and the cognitive and mental health of Black students. Their other research interests include how to mitigate the harm from the above relationships via prosocial behaviors in race-centered spaces, as well as the health effects, social support, counterspaces, psychometrics, and research methods related to anti-Black microaggressions—towards understanding the persistence and retention of Black faculty and students in higher educational spaces.

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Nora Satybaldiyeva

Nora Satybaldiyeva is a PhD student in the Joint Doctoral Program in Public Health, Epidemiology, at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and San Diego State University (SDSU). She received her BS in Biology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and her MPH in Epidemiology from SDSU. She is currently a T32 Predoctoral Fellow in the Training Program on Advanced Data Analytics for Behavioral and Social Sciences (TADA-BSSR) at UCSD. Her research interests include using epidemiological methods in combination with data science to better understand substance use among adolescents. More specifically, she is interested in examining social and environmental influences on the early initiation of substance use.

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Lily Steyer

Lily Steyer is a doctoral student in education policy at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. She studies the effects of socioeconomic and racial inequalities on children’s physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development and the role of social policy in advancing equity.

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Christian E Vazquez, PhD, MSW

Christian E Vazquez, PhD, MSW, earned his PhD in Social Work from The University of Texas at Austin, a MSW focused on Leadership of Health and Human Service Organizations from the University of Michigan, and a BA in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Vazquez’s research is grounded in his practice experience as a social worker for a county social services agency (Child and Adult Protective Services) and as a hospital administrator. His work aims to reduce health disparities, particularly among Latinx populations, both at the community and population level. He received several research and fellowship awards during his doctoral program from institutions such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and University of Texas at Austin Graduate School.

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Sara I. Villalta

Sara I. Villalta is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine and will begin an appointment as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University in the fall. Her research interests include children/youth, family and peer relationships, race and ethnicity, education, gender, and social networks. Her dissertation work, supported by a Ford Foundation Dissertation Award, uses Social Network Analysis to investigate the extent of informal racial segregation within adolescent friendship networks by incorporating a multidimensional conceptualization of race and also explores whether racially stratified networks impact academic outcomes for adolescent girls and boys.

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KaLeigh White

KaLeigh White is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Iowa. She studies social inequality, social policy, poverty alleviation, and equity in education. Her dissertation uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine how experiences of social safety net program benefit conditions (e.g., work requirements) and sanctions (e.g., benefit cuts) are related to recipient wellbeing, including material hardship, health, and sense of autonomy in the long-term. She was recently awarded a dissertation support grant from the US Administration for Children and Families for this project. In addition, her work on the relationship between state levels of discretion in welfare programs, state political factors, and the likelihood of social safety net retrenchment was recently published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society. Her current and past research work includes academic, institutional, and applied scholarship examining equity in education. Prior to attending graduate school, KaLeigh worked at a local United Way as the program director of a Retired and Senior Volunteer Program.

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Ying Zhang

Ying Zhang is an assistant professor of Psychology at Clarkson University She obtains a master’s degree in Applied Psychology and earned a doctorate in Human Development and Family Science at Syracuse University in 2021. Dr. Zhang’s interdisciplinary research engages in obtaining theoretical insights and practical solutions to promote child development and reduce mental health disparities. Specifically, Dr. Zhang’s research highlights contextual factors that shape developmental trajectories of self-regulation that offer new insight into the effects of early self-regulation on long-term functioning in adolescence and emerging adulthood.