2013 Strumpf Scholar Award Recipients Announced

The Strumpf Scholar Award, provided by the Linda Brodsky Strumpf Liberal Arts Centennial Graduate Endowment, recognizes outstanding achievement and promise in areas of research supported by the Child Study Center. Students who receive the Strumpf Scholar Award show innovation and promise in their own research, often have multiple lines of research, and have begun the process of sharing this work with the child psychology research community via presentations and often publications. Selected graduate students are provided with two years of summer support, as well as additional funds for research-related costs.

We are pleased to announce the 2013 Strumpf Scholars: Elizabeth Miller, a Child Clinical Psychology graduate student, and Santiago Morales, a Developmental Psychology graduate student.

Elizabeth’s research focuses on child maltreatment. She received her B.A. in psychology from Harvard University in 2009, and then became part of a research team at the University of California-San Diego studying the implementation of evidence-based practices in the child welfare system. Here at Penn State, she is working with Dr. Sandra Azar, studying the relationship between social cognition and parenting risk in disadvantaged mothers. A second line of research focuses on the effects of child maltreatment on externalizing problems, including substance use and risky sexual behavior. To date, Elizabeth and Dr. Azar have published a paper on parent engagement in Head Start and presented a poster on social cognition and the course of child maltreatment. The Strumpf Scholar Award will provide time and flexibility, allowing for increased productivity, as well as support travel to conferences. Elizabeth is currently working on a manuscript examining the relationships between sexual abuse, substance use problems, and risky sexual behavior in foster youth, and more is expected in the upcoming year.

Santiago received his B.A. in neuroscience from Hiram College in 2011. In his years as an undergraduate, he worked with Dr. Tom Koehnle studying animal temperament in free-living squirrels and laboratory rats. Currently, he is working with Dr. Kristin Buss and Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar studying emotion, emotion regulation, and temperament in children. He is particularly interested in the physiological and neurobiological methods used to study and characterize temperament and affect. Recently, Santiago has been investigating the relation between attention bias towards threat, fearful temperament, and the development of anxiety disorders. With support from the Strumpf Scholar Award, he is starting an experiment assessing attention bias towards threat using eye-tracking technology in undergraduates screened for high levels of anxiety. The Strumpf Scholar Award will give Santiago the opportunity to present and discuss the results of this study at conferences as well as provide the time and flexibility needed to write manuscripts currently in preparation.

Please join us in congratulating Elizabeth and Santiago!