Summer Research Opportunities
Opportunities 2012
for
Graduate Students
|
As part of our recruitment efforts at Temple University to increase the number of students receiving doctoral degrees in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBES) from underrepresented population groups, three major undergraduate audiences will be targeted. They include the students at:
- Temple University.
- Historically Black colleges in our home region.
- Hispanic-serving institutions in our home region.
The available pipeline at Temple University is promising, both in terms of numbers of students and academic talent. Thus, it will be a goal of our AGEP work to reduce the sizable gap between the number of
underrepresented minorities (URMs) who attend Temple to earn an undergraduate degree and the number of URMs who continue their education at the graduate level at our university. To accomplish this goal, we have increased the number of summer research opportunities (SROP) available to promising URMs in their junior year. Monies from the National Science Foundation have allowed us to sponsor 11, 12, and 9 URM sophomore and junior undergraduates in the summers of 2006, 2007, and 2008, respectively. Four URM graduate students were also offered support in Summer 2007.
In future years, we envision extending the SROP experience to prospective URM graduate students from the historically Black and Hispanic-serving colleges in our home region. Further, we anticipate that the SROP experiences in research and quantitative analyses offered by Temple University will serve to promote students’ interest in pursuing their graduate studies at our university or at one of our partner schools in the Great Lakes Alliances for SbeS (GLASS). We will, as part of our evaluation efforts, monitor the mentoring of SBES students exposed to SROP opportunities; the number of submitted grants by SBES or SROP students; and the placement of talented undergraduate students with SROP experience into graduate programs.
Highlights 2006-2009
Students who participated in SROP in 2006, 2007, and 2008 have published, submitted papers for review, and made presentations at professional meetings. In addition, three graduate students participated in the MEGA conference held in Chicago in February 2008. One graduate student attended the HUTEP Institute on Postdoctoral Preparation in September 2008. In June 2008, when Temple University sponsored The INS and OUTS of Spatial Learning: From Theory to Practice Conference at the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center, one undergraduate and six graduate students from Temple were sponsored by GLASS to attend the conference. Two graduate students also participated in the Compact on Faculty Diversity sponsored by the Southern Regional Education Board in October 2008. Finally, in February 2009, six graduate students presented their research at the Chicago GLASS Alliance meeting organized by Patrice Dickerson of Ohio State University and Cheryl Judice of Northwestern University.
Student Profiles
Fatima Abbas
Geography and Urban Studies
Fatima's summer research was sourced through the bITS Program, under the supervision of Dr. Michele Masucci. Fatima focused on promoting technological and community empowerment for underrepresented minorities in the context of geography education, blogs, and the creation of a community GIS. Her analysis was presented as "The Blog: A Tool in Youth Technology Instruction and GIS Development" on November 1, 2006, at the Race, Ethnicity and Place Conference of the
Association of American Geographers held at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX.
Fatima was named "Honorable Mention" in the 2007 Morris K. Udall Undergraduate Scholarship competition. Her award carries with it a stipend of $350. The Udall Foundation offers scholarship monies to future leaders in environmental fields related to business, economics, education, engineering, health, justice, policy, science, and urban planning and renewal.
Finally, Fatima gained admission to two programs of study: (1) University of Edinburgh, "MSc Global Health and Public Policy," in the School of Health in Social Science, which is part of the Centre for International Public Health Policy; and (2) London School of Economics, "MSc International Health Policy," in the Department of Social Policy. She initially planned to attend the London School of Economics, but decided to enter law school to earn a J.D. before undertaking her Ph.D. studies.
Shameema Adibzadeh
Religion and Sociology
Shameema was awarded a travel grant to study Islamic marriage in Egypt. Dr. Khalid Blankenship supervised her research. Shameema is waiting for a decision on her application to graduate school.
Aneesah Latise Akbar-Uqdah
Anthropology
Under the guidance of Dr. Sydney White, Aneesah worked in the area of developing sustainability of community-based organizations for youth in Philadelphia. She decided to pursue the Master of Public Health degree at Emery University's Rollins School of Public Health. She has graduated with her M.P.H. and published a paper on drinking water and health in Egypt.
Jessica André
Psychology
Jessica defended her dissertation in September 2010 and began a post-doctoral fellowship in Yale University's Psychiatry Department in October 2010. She recently coauthored a paper that is being published in Neuropsychology.
Marcella Aramburo
Sociology
Under the guidance of Professor Sherri Grasmuck, Marcella spent the summer examining the racial/ethnic identities and parental expectations of second-generation immigrant college students in a racially diverse university context. Her work focused on the analysis of interviews with four Vietnamese females with varying backgrounds. She presented her work as "Finding Your Place at 'Diversity University' " at the Association of Black Sociologists Annual Meeting held in Montreal in August 2006.
Laurian Bowles
Anthropology
Laurian published a chapter in the book entitled Expressions of the Body: Representations in African Text and Image in 2009.
LaToya Burden
Psychology
LaToya worked with Assistant Professor Peter Marshall on a behavioral and neurophysiological experiment with preschoolers. She was responsible for measuring "interference" in the children's ability to execute a specific action and for running statistical tests. LaToya presented the results of her summer work as
"Behavioral and Neurophysiological Assessment of Perception-Action Interactions in Preschool Children" in a poster session at the
Society for Research in Child Development 2007 Biennial Meeting in Boston on March 30, 2007. She is a coauthor of a submitted paper.
Jeffrey Carroll
Political Science/Ph.D.
Jeff used AGEP funding to initiate his research into how private investors utilize information to make decisions surrounding community and economic development. He has narrowed his research focus from engagement and policy to issues of information and urban economic development. He has made two presentations.
Hio Tong "Esther" Castillo
Sociology
Esther’s summer research involved the impact of instant messaging and MySpace on teenager's identity development. She worked under the guidance of Dr. Shanyang Zhou. Having since completed her master’s degree in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University, Esther was accepted into the doctoral program at Temple University and received a Future Faculty Fellowship to fund her studies.
Corrine Castro
Sociology/Ph.D.
Corrine received AGEP travel funds in 2008 to attend the Grants 101: Professional Grant Proposal Writing Workshop hosted by the Grant Institute at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, PA. She also received travel funds to participate in the SREB Conference on the Compact for Diversity in Fall 2008 and the GLASS Graduate Student Research Conference in Chicago in February 2009.
Melissa Correa
Psychology
For her summer project, Melissa worked under the guidance of Michelle Harmon, Project Coordinator, and assisted in preparing the first draft of the final foundation report for the Family and Children's Policy Collaborative. Melissa's exemplary work on the project led to her hire as a research assistant on a study of early child care and youth development with Dr. Marsha Weinraub and then in the Laboratory for Aphasia
Research and Treatment under Dr. Nadine Martin. In Summer 2010, she completes work for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as a research technical assistant before entering a master's degree program in Marriage and Family Therapy at LaSalle University.
Raymond Crookes
Psychology
Raymond is entering a Ph.D. program in Psychology at Columbia University in Fall 2010. He presented a poster at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association. He is also a coauthor on a paper to be presented at Spatial Cognition 2010,
an international and interdisciplinary conference organized by the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center and the Transregional Collaborative Research Center. The event is scheduled to be held August 15-19, 2010 in Portland, OR.
Karla Diaz
Psychology
For her summer project, Karla worked under the mentorship of Drs. Nora Newcomb and Thomas Shipley in the area of spatial development. While waiting for decisions on her applications to graduate school, she continued as a Research Assistant in the Sensations and Perceptions/Social Cognition and Personality Development Labs.
Dominique Dumay
Psychology
Dominique’s summer research experience led to a presentation at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society. Mentored by Drs. Nora Newcomb and Thomas Shipley, she is currently a Research Assistant in the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center.
Summer Edward
Psychology
Summer studied contextual factors associated with resilience from aggression and depression among impoverished, ethnic minority children under the guidance of Dr. Deborah Drabick. Her work was presented at the 2008 annual meeting of the Society of Prevention Research in San Francisco.
Nicole Finnie
Sociology
Nicole engaged in summer research with Dr. Kevin Delaney. Her work focused on
the commonality among whites to identify and reinforce specific racial ideologies of covert domination and privilege despite attributing negative traits to the meaning of whiteness. She analyzed in-depth interviews with three self-identified white students. Nicole presented her findings in a paper entitled
"Understanding Whiteness: A Qualitative Analysis of White College Students’ Perceptions of Racial Identity" at the Association of Black Sociologists Annual Meeting held in Montreal in August 2006.
LaCole Foots
Political Science
LaCole’s research topic was the effectiveness of grassroots politics at the state level. She found that people have tremendous potential political power and was pleased to learn that state and local politicians highly prioritize pleasing their constituents. One outcome of her research was being offered a position with Martin O'Malley, Governor of Maryland. LaCole will apply to graduate programs for Fall 2011.
India Hardy
Psychology
Under the guidance of Dr. Thomas Shipley, India performed research in the area of psychological/categorical encoding in complex spaces. She will attend Catholic University in Washington, D.C. to pursue a master’s degree in Psychology with a specialization in children, families, and culture. Upon completion of her master’s degree, she plans to pursue a doctorate.
Christina Jackson
Sociology
Christina's summer work resulted in the co-authoring of a paper with Dr. Dustin Kidd entitled "DuBois and the Art of Propaganda." The paper has been accepted for presentation at the 10th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences held in Las Vegas, NV, on February 8-9, 2007. Christina and Dr. Kidd are also the recipients of the Iris and Eugene Rotberg Undergraduate Research Humanities Award from the Temple University Center for the Humanities. The award funded their continued work together in the 2006-2007 academic year. Another result of their collaboration is the June 2010 acceptance of
"Art as Propaganda: Bringing Du Bois into the Sociology of Art" by Sociology Compass. Christina received her master's degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is currently at the dissertation stage of her Ph.D.
Anastasia Johnson
Psychology
Anastasia’s research was in the area of cognitive neuroscience, studying language disorders under the guidance of Dr. Nadine Martin. She is currently enrolled in the Master of Speech and Language Pathology program at Keene State College and plans to apply to doctoral programs with a focus on brain trauma for Fall 2011.
Dalissy Jose
Psychology
Dalissy’s summer work dealt with the evaluation of Pennsylvania's One Book, Every Young Child literacy program under the guidance of Dr. Marsha Weinraub and Ms. Michelle Harmon. Dalissy interned at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center and continued her work at Temple with Dr. Kareem Johnson in the area of the effects of optimism, positive expectations, and resilience on positive adjustment to college. Dalissy was accepted to an M.S.W. program following graduation.
Rhea Miles
Psychology
Rhea’s research was in the area of spatial development under the mentorship of Drs. Nora Newcomb and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. She is in a Master of Science in Counseling Psychology at Chatham University, specializing in Infant Mental Health. Following graduation, she plans to begin her doctoral studies.
Bertha Nash
Psychology
Bertha engaged in summer research with Drs. Nora Newcomb and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. She presented her work at the annual meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in April 2009. Bertha was accepted to several Ph.D. programs and chose to attend the University of Cincinnati.
Labaron Palmer
Geography and Urban Studies
Labaron undertook his summer research through the bITS Program, under the guiding hand of Dr. Michele Masucci. The product of his work was presented as "Perceptions of Disease, Geography and Healthscape among Minority High School Students," on November 3, 2006, at the Race, Ethnicity and Place Conference of the
Association of American Geographers held at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX. He has since earned his M.A. in Geography from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. His graduate research studies culminated in a quantitative analysis entitled "The Effectiveness of Sporting Facilities as a Tool of Economic Development: The New Era of Stadiums and Ballparks," which has been submitted for journal publication. Labaron is applying to doctoral programs for Fall 2011.
Martine Quinn
Sociology
Martine presented her research on the examination of marriage in the Black community from 1972 to 2008 using GSS data at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociology Society meeting in Boston in March 2010. Her dissertation proposal is focused on the concept of Black professionals between 25 and 35 years of age becoming middle class.
Aisha Rios
Anthropology/Ph.D.
Aisha's summer funding resulted in the preparation of a paper entitled "The Survivor/Perpetrator Conundrum: Navigating Mainstream and Alternative Discourses in the Domestic Violence Movement." She is scheduled to present the paper in a session at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans in November 2010.
Laura Shinn
Economics/Ph.D.
Laura earned her doctorate in Economics from Temple University in January 2011. At the beginning of the year, she began a
2-year fellowship at the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion (CHERP), which is a Veterans Administration Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence.
Richard Smith
Sociology/Ph.D.
Richard used AGEP funding to construct the first three chapters of his dissertation. It was noted that if he continued at his initial pace, he would complete two years earlier than the average of almost nine years' time-to-degree for students who have graduated from the Sociology doctoral program in the last seven years. Formerly Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, PA, Richard now holds a tenure track position at McDaniel College in Baltimore, MD.
Travis Taniguchi
Criminal Justice/Ph.D.
Travis used AGEP funding to learn GIS techniques needed for his dissertation research. These spatial techniques are crucial to the completion of his dissertation, which would not be possible without the methodology learned by accessing SROP funding. He has published one paper, submitted a second paper, and made several presentations.
Travis will receive his Ph.D. in May 2010 and has accepted a position as a criminologist with the Redlands Police Department near Los Angeles, CA. He will be working with a progressive police chief who has ties to David Weisburd, the recipient of the 2010 Stockholm Prize in Criminology. This opportunity allows Travis to gain additional experience at the cutting edge of his field as he prepares to enter the professoriate.
Amanda Thomas
Psychology
Amanda has been accepted to the doctoral program in Developmental Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University.
Amy Yeboah
Sociology/Ph.D.
Amy was provided with AGEP funding to attend the Association of Black Sociologists Annual Meeting in Montreal in August 2006. She presented her paper entitled "Who is to Blame for the Educational Gap?" Her work argues that
minority students do care about their educational and occupational future and want to graduate high school as much as their white counterparts do—and that to close the racial gap in the high school dropout rate, society needs to provide better job prospects for minorities. At the meeting, Amy was also presented with the
third-place award in the Undergraduate Student Paper Competition. Her
paper was published in Clarity magazine in 2007.
Lina Zapata
Psychology
Lina
worked with Dr. Donald Hantula in the development of a project related to evolutionary theory and online personal advertisements. She collected information from Yahoo personal ads in hopes of finding support for the theory of sexual selection strategies in human mating. Lina extended her summer work and expanded it for her Honors project. For the latter, she used Facebook to analyze how pictures might provide support for the evolutionary model of human mating. Lina made a presentation of the results of her summer work in a poster session at the Eastern Psychological Association's annual meeting held in Philadelphia in March 2007.
Student Publications
Akbar-Uqdah, A., Highsmith, S., & Tonsy, S. (2009). Drinking water in Egypt: The effects of water
on Egyptians’ health. The Undergraduate Research Journal at The American University of Cairo, http://www1.aucegypt.edu/conferences/wpundergrad/JournalVol2.htm.
Bowles, L. (2009). Imaging migrant women and the embodied market: Accra, Ghana. In C.
Baker (Ed.), Expressions of the Body: Representations in African Text and Image (pp. 313-336). Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing Group.
Castro, C. (in preparation). In the margins of the academy: Women of color and job satisfaction.
In S.E. Moore, R. Alexander Jr., & A.J. Lemelle Jr. (Eds.), Dilemmas of black faculty at U.S. predominantly white institutions: Issues in the post-multicultural era.
Drowos, D.B., Berryhill, M., André, J.M., & Olson, I.R. (2010). True memory, false memory,
and subjective recollection deficits after focal parietal lobe lesions. Neuropsychology, 24(4), 465-475.
Marshall, P.J., Burden, L.M., Shipley, T.F., & Bouquet, C.A. (under revision). Perception meets
action: Motor contagion in four-year-old children. Developmental Neuropsychology.
Ratcliffe, J.H., & Taniguchi, T.A. (2008). Is crime higher around drug-gang street corners? Two
spatial approaches to the relationship between gang set space and local crime levels. Crime Patterns and Analysis, 1(1), 23-46.
Ratcliffe, J.H., Taniguchi, T.A., & Taylor, R.B. (2009). The crime reduction effects of public CCTV
cameras: A multi-method spatial approach. Justice Quarterly, 26(4), 746-770.
Smith, R.M. (submitted). Undefiled! The purposes of sex from Protestant perspectives. Journal
of Religion and Culture.
Taniguchi, T.A., Ratcliffe, J.H., & Taylor, R.B. (accepted). Gang set space, drug markets, and
crime: Violent and property crimes around corners, drug corners, and disputed drug corners in Camden. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency.
Taniguchi, T.A., Rengert, G.F., & McCord, E.S. (2009). Where size matters: Agglomeration
economies of illegal drug markets in Philadelphia. Justice Quarterly, 26(4), 670-694.
Yeboah, A. (2007). How does a black child become a black scholar In America? Clarity Magazine,
No. 2, p. 4.
Yeboah, A. (submitted). Not without my father: How family structure influences black dropout.
The Journal of Family Issues.
Yeboah, A. (submitted). The sociological différance of Du Bois. The Black Scholar.
Student Presentations
Abbas, F. (2006). The blog: A tool in youth technology instruction and GIS development. Race,
Ethnicity and Place Conference of the Association of American Geographers, San Marcos, TX.
André, J.M., Leach, P.T., & Gould, T.J. (2009). Nicotine reverses NMDAR antagonist-induced
deficits in contextual fear conditioning through high affinity nAChRs. Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Chicago, IL.
Aramburo, M. (2006). Finding your place at “Diversity University.” Annual Meeting of the
Association of Black Sociologists, Montreal, Canada.
Byrd, G. (2009). The sociological links between African American and Native American: People
of African American descent acknowledging their Native American ancestry. Paper presented at the GLASS AGEP Research Conference, Chicago, IL.
Carroll, J. (2008). The intersection of cybersafety, place, and policy in the experiences of
high school students in North Philadelphia. Association of American Geographers, Boston, MA.
Carroll, J. (2008). Words of wisdom: How to thrive in graduate school. Student presentation
at the MEGA Midwest AGEP Conference, Chicago, IL.
Castro, C. (2009). Examining academic governance through the embodied experiences
of women faculty. Roundtable discussion at the Annual Conference of the Eastern Sociological Society, Baltimore, MD.
Castro, C. (2009). Women of color negotiating academic governance. Paper presented at
the GLASS AGEP Research Conference, Chicago, IL.
Chen, D., Drabick, D., & Edward, S. (2008). Child and contextual factors associated with
resilience from aggression and depression among impoverished, ethnic minority children. Society for Prevention Research, San Francisco, CA.
Crookes, R.D., Shipley, T.F., & Hegarty, M. (2010). Development of a self-report measure of
spatial reasoning abilities: The Philadelphia Spatial Abilities Scale. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Brooklyn, NY.
Finnie, N. (2006). Understanding whiteness: A qualitative analysis of white college students’
perceptions of racial identity. Annual Meeting of the Association of Black Sociologists, Montreal, Canada.
Fisher, K., Nash, B., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Newcombe, N. (2009). Breaking the mold: Altering
preschoolers’ concepts of geometric shapes. Paper presented at the biennial meeting for the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, CO.
Fitzhugh, S., Shipley, T., Newcombe, N., McKenna, K., & Dumay, D. (2008). Mental rotation
of real-world Shepard-Metzler figures: An eye tracking study. Poster presented at the Annual Conference of the Vision Sciences Society, Naples, FL.
Hegarty, M., Crookes, R.D., Dara-Abrams, D., & Shipley, T.F. (2010). Do all science disciplines
rely on spatial abilities? Preliminary evidence from self-report questionnaires. Paper presented at the Spatial Cognition 2010 Conference, Portland, OR.
Jackson, C., & Kidd, D. (2007). DuBois and the art of propaganda. Tenth Annual Meeting of the
American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Las Vegas, NV.
Marsh, M. (2009). Through the eyes of those who are black and white: A biracial perspective of
inequality in America. Paper presented at the GLASS AGEP Research Conference, Chicago, IL.
Palmer, L. (2006). Perceptions of disease, geography, and healthscape among minority high
school students. Race, Ethnicity and Place Conference of the Association of American Geographers, San Marcos, TX.
Quinn, M. (2010). Predictors of marital status in the Black community. Paper presented at the
80th Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociology Society, Boston, MA.
Smith, R.M. (2009). Validating beliefs: Liberal and conservative protestant Christian views of
sexual morality in America. Paper presented at the GLASS AGEP Research Conference, Chicago, IL.
Taniguchi, T.A. (2007). Crime and its proximity to drug gang sites: A spatial intelligence
challenge. Paper presented at the Ninth Crime Mapping Research Conference, Pittsburgh, PA.
Taniguchi, T.A. (2008). Buyers, sellers, and the spatio-temporal dimension of drug markets
in Camden, NJ. Paper presented at the Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis Symposium, Anchorage, AK.
Taniguchi, T.A. (2009). Policing a negotiated world: An empirical assessment of the ecological
theory of policing. Paper presented at the GLASS AGEP Research Conference, Chicago, IL.
Thomas, A.L., Marshall, P.J., Bouquet, C.A., & Shipley, T.F. (2009). Studying motor contagion
in four-year-old children. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, CO.
Xie, H., & Fleurant, N. (2008). Popularity and aggression: Direction of influences. XXIX
International Congress of Psychology, Berlin, Germany.
Yeboah, A. (2008). Not without my father: How family structure influences black dropout
rates. Paper presented to the Association of Black Sociologists, Boston, MA.
Yeboah, A. (2009). Not without my father: How family structure influences black dropout
rates. Paper presented at the GLASS AGEP Research Conference, Chicago, IL.
