The Child Study Center offers a CSC Small Research Grants Program to provide research support for CSC faculty affiliates across the university. The CSC Small Research Grants program supports faculty research activities that will advance innovative and programmatic research of high scientific merit and contribute to faculty competitiveness for external funding in areas of the CSC mission and goals. Awards are competitive and fund research activities such as pilot studies, preparation of research materials, travel costs for research purposes, participant payments, consultant honoraria, wages for research assistants, or resources, equipment, or software needed for research. Travel to professional meetings and publication costs are not allowable. A call for applications goes out each spring. You can view the most recent application here. For information on submitting a proposal or questions, please contact Laureen Teti at Lot1@psu.edu.
See below for a list of previous recipients.
2025-2026 Awardees
James DiPerna, Professor of Education. “Unpacking the ‘Black Box’ of Routine SEL Implementation: What Works, How, and Why Across Classroom Contexts.”
Lori A. Francis, Professor of Biobehavioral Health. “Examining the Impact of Access to Greenspace on Self-Regulation and Stress Response in Preschool Children.”
Murray-Perdue, Ph.D.
Samantha Murray-Perdue, Assistant Research Professor, Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, & Mark E. Feinberg, Research Professor, Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center. “Family Foundations on Social Media (FF-SM).”
Douglas M. Teti, Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, Professor of Psychology and Pediatrics. “SIESTA-EASI pilot.”
2024-2025 Awardees
Chardée Galán, Assistant Professor of Psychology. “Understanding the Pathways to Racism-Based Traumatic Stress in Ethnoracially Minoritized Youth.”
Kathleen Keller, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Nutritional Sciences. “Sex Differences in the Development of Children’s Appetite Regulation.”
Lucy Shin, Ph.D., Assistant Research Professor of Psychology, & Koraly Pérez-Edgar, McCourtney Professor of Child Studies and Professor of Psychology. “The Ecology of Infant Self-Regulation: Mother-Infant Synchrony and Family and Community Resources.”
2023-2024 Awardees
Jennifer P. Agans, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management. “A Qualitative Exploration of Experiences in Diverse Youth Sport Contexts.”
Sheri Berenbaum, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology and Pediatrics. “Archiving NIH-Funded Data on The Nature and Causes of Gender Development.”
James DiPerna, Ph.D., Professor of Education. “Stress, Support, and Social Emotional Learning: Voices and Implementation Choices of Education Stakeholders (VOICES).”
Douglas M. Teti, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, Professor of Psychology and Pediatrics. “Family-Based Sleep Intervention and Children’s Transition to Kindergarten: A Pilot Study.”
2022-2023 Awardees
Jennifer P. Agans, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management. “Identifying Characteristics of Youth Sports to Promote Person-Context Fit.” Dr. Agans’ funded research will develop a measure of activity characteristics and implementation features in youth sport and assess whether these contextual factors appeal differently to youth with different individual characteristics (e.g., age, gender, race/ethnicity, self-perceived athletic competence). Our “hypothesis” is that youth sport is not a one-size-fits-all context but an overarching category containing a diverse constellation of activities that can nevertheless be empirically described and aligned with the characteristics of youth to support goodness of fit.”
Charles Geier, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, and Co-Director, Center for Brain, Behavior, and Cognition (CBBC). “Examining the Neural Basis of Habit Formation in Adolescents and Young Adults.” Dr. Geier’s funded research provides additional support to increase the sample size and strengthen an on-going pilot study aimed at characterizing how habits are formed at the brain circuit level in healthy adolescents (13-17 years) and young adults (25-35 years). Results from this work will yield the first published studies characterizing habits in a developmental sample and provide foundational preliminary data necessary for external grant applications and future longitudinal assessments.”
Sarah Myruski, Ph.D., Associate Research Professor, Psychology. “Integrating Drawing and Mindfulness to Reduce Anxiety in Adolescents.” The proposed study will test the feasibility of a novel drawing-based anxiety intervention that integrates an approachable and tangible activity with mindfulness elements. We will extend the protocol of an ongoing pilot study of emerging adults (N = 54) by recruiting a pilot sample of adolescents (N = 40). We will examine whether the drawing intervention results in a significant change pre- to post-drawing in emotional state and parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) engagement indexed via respiratory sinus arrythmia (RSA), and whether anxiety symptoms are reduced between baseline and one week later. We will also test whether individual differences in self-reported difficulties with emotion regulation will predict the magnitude of anxiety, affect, and RSA changes induced by the drawing activity.”
Emma Rose, Ph.D., Assistant Teaching Professor, Psychology. “Impacts of Ethnoracial Determinants of Health on Food Insecurity and Substance Use in Undergraduate Students.” In preparation for a recently submitted R61/R33 proposal, which aims to consider these associations and their related neurobiological impacts, the current proposal aims to prepare and pilot our key measures of ethnoracial determinants of health, food insecurity, and substance use. The study will further aim to characterize the associations between ethnoracial determinants of health, food insecurity, and substance use in racially and ethnically minoritized undergraduate students and, in doing so, will provide critical information regarding the feasibility of our procedures prior to commencing the primary project.”