CRF Announces 2016 Fall Travel Awardees

The Center for Research on Families is excited to announce the recipients of this year’s Fall Travel Awards. Every semester CRF provides funding for graduate students to present their family research at an academic conference. CRF’s award helps offset the costs of travel and allows students the opportunity to meet and present with other researchers in their field. Since we began to offer the award in 2010, CRF has helped dozens of students from a wide range of disciplines attend national and international academic conferences.

This fall, CRF received the highest number of applications since the inception of the awards. Out of this highly-qualified group of applicants, CRF awarded five $300 travel awards to the following graduate students:

Martha Balaguera
Martha is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science. Under the guidance of Professor Sonia Alvarez, her scholarship focuses on questions of state violence, changing forms of citizenship and collective political struggle in the 21st Century from a transnational feminist perspective. Her dissertation, ‘We are all migrants:’ Citizenship in Transit and the Perils and Promises of Crossing Mexico, examines how everyday encounters of citizens and transient migrants undertaking perilous journeys on their way to the United States are transforming contemporary understandings of large-scale political phenomena like state sovereignty, citizenship and democracy. Martha will use her award to attend the American Studies Association 2016 Annual Meeting in Denver, CO.

Dana N. Johnson
Dana is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology under the guidance of Professor Julie Hemment. Her research focuses on the cultural meanings of mobility in relation to the highly politicized issue of brain drain from Serbia. Her dissertation examines how contemporary stances toward mobility articulate aspirations to dignify the conditions of life and work. It also discusses how post-socialist youth understand themselves and construct life projects in the context of ongoing political and socioeconomic change. The CRF travel grant will allow Dana to present a paper at the 115th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Minneapolis, MN.

Adrial Lobelo
​Adrial, whose research focuses on the health of vulnerable populations, is a nurse practitioner and doctoral candidate in the College of Nursing, working under the mentorship of Associate Professor Genevieve Chandler.  He is involved in a project analyzing a large, federally-managed data set to explore the biological connections between health, education and race. His research and scholarly pursuits have received support from many health organizations, including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the American Nurses Association and the National Association of Hispanic Nurses. Adrial’s award will be used to support his travel to the American Psychiatric Nurses Association's 30th Annual Conference in Hartford, Connecticut.

Fiona Ge
Fiona is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Her research broadly focuses on psychosocial factors that contribute to well-functioning romantic relationship processes. Working with Professor Paula Pietromonaco, her current research examines how culture shapes the way individuals communicate with their romantic partners and the implications for romantic relationship quality. Fiona will attend the 18th Annual Meeting for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference in San Antonio, CA with the help of her travel award.

Sarah Winokur
Sarah is a doctoral student in the Neuroscience and Behavior Program in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. She is working under the guidance of Assistant Professor Mariana Pereira to study the neurobiology underlying parental behavior across the postpartum period. Sarah's current research focuses on investigating neurobiological mechanisms of the dynamic maternal brain circuitry underlying cognitive, motivational, and affective processes at the chemical and genetic level in healthy rat mothers as well as in a rat model that exhibits heritable postpartum depression-like symptomatology. Sarah’s travel award will allow her to travel to The Society for Neuroscience Conference in San Diego, California.

CRF offers many funding opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students conducting family research. For more information about the Center for Research on Families’ student research and Travel Awards program, please visit our Students page.