The 2024 Irene E. Harms Graduate Scholarship Awardee is Briah Glover, a third-year Developmental Psychology doctoral student. Briah’s research program is rooted in community engagement and focused on understanding and elevating the experiences of minoritized youth and young adults. Her mentor is Dr. Dawn Witherspoon.
As an undergraduate student at Howard University, community engagement was a critical part of her training. This experience taught her the importance of discussing perceived needs and strengths of communities, as well as building and maintaining community relationships. After graduating magna cum laude with a degree in Psychology, her decision to attend The Pennsylvania State University was heavily influenced by the opportunity to continue participating in community-engaged research.
At Penn State, Briah has played an active role in the Parents And Children Together (PACT) initiative, which has provided her with an inside look at how researcher-community relationships are built and maintained. In Dr. Witherspoon’s Context and Development Lab, Briah has worked extensively on the PARADE Project, a project that examines how place and culture shape the links between parenting and youth behaviors in African American families. Through her work on this project, Briah has gained great insight into the research process and has expanded her within-group knowledge on Black American development. Her master’s thesis explored the indirect effects of ethnic-racial socialization on anger reactivity in Black youth through emotion efficacy, the belief people have about their ability to control their emotions. Her findings indicated similarities and differences in how emotion efficacy mediates ethnic-racial socialization’s effect on anger reactivity for Black American and Black Caribbean adolescents. This work is informing her dissertation preparation, which will focus on how emotion regulation strategies are socialized in minoritized families. Long-term, Briah would like to explore ways to bring research and its findings to marginalized communities.
The Irene E. Harms Award will grant more opportunities for Briah to advance as a researcher. Funds from the award will enable her to conduct a planned study and to expand on findings from the PARADE Project. Additionally, the award will help with travel and registration fees related to external training she hopes to complete during her time at Penn State. Overall, the Irene E. Harms Award will assist Briah in achieving her goal to better understand and promote positive emotion development in marginalized communities through a career in community-engaged research, consulting, and translational science.