One grant group and their faculty mentor in New York City last year (l-r): Jessica Green Rosas, Dr. Miya Barnett, Corinna Klein, J.C. Gonzalez, and Erika Luis Sanchez
Fourteen students from UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School were awarded $2000 Graduate Student Summer Minigrants for Multidisciplinary Research on COVID-19 and its Impacts (MRCI) from UCSB Graduate Division. The MRCI program supports research and creative projects by individual graduate students or teams of UCSB graduate students during the 2020 Summer Session that provide insight into the pandemic and its far-reaching effects in our lives.
The Graduate Division chose nine proposals from the Gevirtz School and a tenth awarded for a collaboration between students in Social Sciences and Gevirtz. Seven of these projects are being researched by individuals, while three are team proposals. The areas of research range from examining different types of discrimination related to the pandemic to discovering how to provide the best mental health care for teachers and front-line responders during this difficult time.
The purpose of the grant program is not only to fund valuable research and creative projects, but also to create a multi-disciplinary community that allows graduate students to learn from each other about different research approaches and about communicating research to a variety of audiences. To foster this community, the MRCI program will hold a series of webinars as part of the proposal and research funding process. Awardees will also participate in discussions and share their final research findings with the community.
The Gevirtz School awardees are:
From the Department of Counseling, Clinical and School Psychology
Sepideh Alavi, “Parenting During a Global Pandemic: Health Care Providers and Their Families at the Frontline of COVID-19”
Maggie Chan, “Teacher Stress and Well-being Amid the COVID-19 Crisis”
Daniel Del Cid and Melissa Janson, “COVID-19’s Impact on Essential Workers’ Distress, Perceptions of Parenting, and Child Mental Health Symptoms”
Jessica Green Rosas, Erika Luis Sanchez, J.C. Gonzalez, and Corinna Klein, “Implementation of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy during COVID-19”
Isabel Lopez, partnering with Chantel Haughton (Department of Communication), “Family Discussions about Mental Health in Black and Latinx Communities in the Context of COVID-19 and Civil Unrest”
Chava Nerenberg, “Resilient in the Face of Lockdown: Application of Best Practices from Mental Health Professionals Serving Aid Workers to the COVID-19 Pandemic”
Ginette Sims, “Stereotyping, Discrimination, and Forced Affiliation: Examining Asian-Americans Experiences of COVID-19”
From the Department of Education
John Cano Barrios, “Understanding faculty’s experiences in transitioning from face-to-face to online instruction in an R1 university during the coronavirus pandemic”
Rachel Schuck, “Special Education Teachers’ Perspectives on Parental Involvement During the COVID-19 Shelter-in-Place”
Jing Yu, “Lost in Lockdown? The Impact of COVID-19 on International Student Mobility”