The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences has announced the 2023 Research Excellence and Diversity fellowship winners. The fellowship was created by an anonymous endowment to provide support for the writing and research of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations.
“The selection of our second cohort of Summer Research Fellows was drawn from a very competitive pool of proposals,” remarked Susan Scarrow, CLASS associate dean of graduate studies. “These students are passionate about their research and creative activities, which cover the broad range of disciplines and methods represented in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.”
The competitive fellowship supports graduate student research excellence and contributes to graduate programs in the college.
“One thing that makes many of these projects so compelling is that they are inspired or informed by the students’ personal experiences and encounters,” Scarrow said. “These summer research fellowships are particularly valuable for our students because they are flexible enough to support students at various stages of their research, whenever the students and their advisors think they need this.
Chosen by a multi-disciplinary faculty committee, winners were selected from a strong pool of applicants from the various disciplines represented in the college. The fellowships are available to CLASS students of all fields of study, providing summer financial support so that they can focus full time on their projects.
The 2023 Research Excellence and Diversity fellows are as follows:
Madeleine Allman, Ph.D. student, psychology
A third-year doctoral student in the Developmental Psychopathology Lab, Madeleine Allman earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology and public health from Tulane University in 2016 and her Master of Public Health in epidemiology from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in 2017. After graduating, she came to Houston to work in global health research at Baylor College of Medicine. Allman is interested in caregiver-child relationships, primarily their impact by exposure to trauma and interventions that focus on the impact of adversity in caregiver-child relationships.
Allman defended her master’s thesis by analyzing the impact of the Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers (MISC) on Social Cognition among Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) in South Africa. She is also working on her dissertation project, focusing on MISC’s implementation in the context of Intimate Partner Violence. Allman is also interested in the assessment and treatment of emotional and behavioral disorders in children and adolescents.
Heather Butina-Sutton, Ph.D. student, history
Heather Butina-Sutton holds a Bachelor of Science in cultural anthropology and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in history under the mentorship of Professor Philip A. Howard. Her research interests include the cultural and socio-economic history of Black women in the Atlantic World, gender studies and public history. Her work has received awards from both the women’s, gender and sexuality studies program and history department at the University of Houston and an honorable mention from the national Black Women’s Studies Association. This summer, Heather will be conducting research in Charleston, SC, for her dissertation, titled “Hucksters, Hawkers, and Ganhadeiras: How Black Women Shaped Culture and Capitalism in the Atlantic World.”
Vanessa Beatriz Golenia, MFA student, creative writing
Vanessa Beatriz Golenia grew up straddling the Tijuana-San Diego border in a home with no common language. Prior to moving to Houston, she bounced between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, writing capitalist poetry for corporate beauty brands. Her work has appeared in Longreads, The Rumpus, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and elsewhere. In 2020, an essay she wrote was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is now slowly chiseling away at her first book.
Symone Daniels, M.A. student, communications
Symone Daniels is in her final semester as a graduate student in the Jack. J Valenti School of Communication. Her thesis project will focus on Black women and how negative stereotypical images in the media impact them in society. She was recently invited to present her research at the TAMU Communicating Diversity Conference held at Texas A&M. She hopes her project adds to conversations about how stereotypes are formed by the media and wants people to challenge their beliefs regarding Black women.
Jeonghyeok Kim, Ph.D. student, economics
Jeonghyeok Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in economics, and her research is in labor, education and health economics. Kim is currently researching “Noncognitive Skills and the Gender Gap in Education and Labor Market Outcome” and “School Closures and Student Outcomes.” [SL1] [HJ2] Currently, Kim has other projects in process that are focused on the relationship between air quality and birth outcomes, industrial robots on health outcomes in Mexico and emerging challenges to global primary education provision.
Jesse Walker, Ph.D. student, psychology
Jesse Walker is a fourth-year doctoral student in the clinical psychology program who received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Clemson University. Following graduation, Walker served as research assistant and later research coordinator on projects under Drs. Carla Danielson and Tatiana Davidson at the Medical University of South Carolina. Jesse received his master’s degree in clinical psychology from the University of Houston in 2021 and, during his time in the Youth & Family Studies Lab, his work has broadly focused on identifying cultural, relational and biological risk and protective factors of depression and suicidal ideation among adolescents and young adults within minoritized groups.
Currently, Walker is conducting his dissertation research, titled “Do Discrimination and Adversity Drive the Inflammatory Basis of Suicidal Ideation Among Black and Latinx Young Adults?” funded by an NRSA F31 National Research Service Award under the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). He has completed clinical practica with the Lone Star Circle of Care, a federally qualified health clinic, the McLean OCD Institute of Houston and the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Women and Children, Southwest in Houston, Texas.
Victor Zuluaga, Ph.D. student, economics
Victor Zuluaga is a graduate student in economics at the University of Houston. Zuluaga is primarily interested in questions in trade and labor economics. Before beginning his doctorate, Zuluaga worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington, D.C. and at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Cali, Colombia.