If there is one thing CYFS affiliate Victoria Molfese has learned over the course of her career, it’s that you don’t do research alone. The Chancellor’s Professor received this year’s Distinguished Research/Creative Career award, as CEHS recognized outstanding faculty and staff at an April 10 awards ceremony.
With collaborative support and seed funding, CYFS faculty affiliates are prepared to grow their research base this spring.
The Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools (CYFS) recently provided grant proposal and development assistance to eight CEHS faculty—all of whom received 2015-16 Layman Awards. The award, funded by UNL’s Office of Research and Economic Development, provides $10,000 in seed money for untenured faculty and supports researchers in their pursuit of external funding.
Distance technology and community mobilization are transforming the mental health landscape of rural Nebraska, where the success of CYFS affiliates’ research may soon benefit communities worldwide.
Richard Bischoff, chair of child, youth and family studies, and Paul Springer, associate professor, are partnering with international colleagues to address an issue that they say transcends geography and culture—access to mental health services. Their model, which was developed six years ago in rural Nebraska communities, integrates distance technology and begins by drawing community members around the proverbial table.
The pioneers of modern temperament research, psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, identified nine traits present at birth that influenced children’s development. Half a century later, temperament research continues to play a key role in unlocking children’s behavioral diversity.
Donning black gowns and caps, they joined their peers among Lincoln Northeast High School’s 2014 graduating class. They waited patiently to cross the stage, grasp their diploma and finally, after four years, flip the tassel.
They are 37 of the 41 Lincoln Northeast students who, in ninth grade, joined the Building Bridges program — a dropout prevention initiative led by CYFS affiliate Michael Scheel and Gina Kunz, CYFS research associate professor. The program is designed to help freshmen transition to high school and navigate a four-year path to graduation.
The mercurial nature of homelessness has kept researchers from pinpointing which factors limit substance use – and how others trigger it – among the nearly 3 million American youth living on the streets.
With a new $400,000 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, CYFS affiliate Kimberly Tyler will use technology to address this sociological challenge for the sake of confronting the societal one.
A challenging 10-year-old responds to neglectful parents by acting out at home. At school, an attentive fourth-grade teacher tries to reach the child by listening, observing and encouraging him.
Can the child’s classroom experience curb the difficult temperament being compounded at home? How will the resulting short-term impacts shape his long-term development?
M. Meghan Davidson, a CYFS faculty affiliate and assistant professor of educational psychology at UNL, has earned the Fritz and Linn Kuder Early Career Scientist/Practitioner Award from Division 17 of the American Psychological Association.
The award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the science and practice of counseling psychology, is given to a scholar who has received a doctoral degree within the past 10 years.