Hannah Raslan
In 2018, thousands of Central American migrants, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, fled their home countries to seek a better life in Mexico or the US. This exodus of migrants has been met both at the US/Mexico and the Mexico/Guatemala border with hostility, violence and discrimination. Hannah Marias research will examine the motives of this migration, specifically focusing on the link between neoliberal economic reforms in Central America and economic migration. She will travel throughout Mexico to conduct interviews with migrants in all phases of their journeys. She […]
Celene Bolaños
The recent economic recession and political turmoil in Brazil has driven over half of Brazil’s Haitian migrant population northbound towards the United States. This wave of over 50,000 Haitians has been met by tightening immigration policies from both the United States and Mexico, making the journey more difficult and dangerous and transforming Mexico into a country of destination. This flow of Haitian refugees is overwhelmingly male, despite the fact that women account for nearly half of the global migrant and refugee population. I hypothesize that gender and race are fundamental […]
Julian Ponce
Current Bio: Julian is currently living in NYC and pursuing a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in the department of Population and Family Health with a certificate in research methods. Julin has been working on a childhood asthma community based participatory project in San Juan, Puerto Rico and a study on depression and loneliness among retired adults in Santiago, Chile. Haas Scholars Project: Drinking potable tap water has been associated with decreased consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs). However, more than one […]
Rhonda Armstrong
It should not be surprising to hear that people respond to rejection in various ways. Additionally, there are several different pathways to achieving power, and people in powerful positions consistently have more adaptive responses to rejection. Rather than rejection resiliency being a product of power, Rhonda’s research seeks to show that it is actually a predictor of power attainment. By manipulating rejection resiliency, she intends to find differences across participants such that those who are primed with high rejection resiliency will achieve more power in a paired task than those […]
Simone Matecna
Policy makers and developmental psychologists know that addressing the effects of poverty in adults often comes too late to be effective. Imagine a 30-year-old man named Sal who does not know whether or not he will be able to pay his rent or buy food for his family at the end of the month. It is not hard to understand why this uncertainty might cause Sal psychological stress on an ongoing basis. In fact, the ways in which financial stress impact mental health in adults have been well documented and […]
Grace Allison
Current Bio: Grace is a full-time research assistant at Columbia University. Haas Scholars Project: Emotion regulation is the process by which individuals manage their emotions. A robust set of findings suggests that certain emotion regulation strategies promote well-being whereas others undermine well-being. This project will utilize romantic relationships as the social context in which to examine the effects of various emotion regulation strategies. Work related to this topic has either not considered partner perceptions or has relied on experimental paradigms that have low ecological validity. To address these limitations, Grace […]
Kimberly Martin
Many people assume that racism is a binary dimension whereby people are either racist or not. However, over forty years of research indicates that not only are there several distinctive forms of racism, but that they exist on a continuum. Recent trends have shown that while blatant forms of racism seem to be decreasing, there are indirect forms of racism now prevailing. Through the collection of survey data, Kimberly’s research will investigate how these subtle and even unconscious forms of racism affect peoples perceptions of institutions associated with a particular […]
Jennifer Fei
Jennifer’s research will explore the impact of current International Rescue Committee (IRC) Resettlement Programs on female economic empowerment. Her working hypothesis is that the empowerment effect of the IRC on refugee women will vary depending on cultural norms, resettlement program type, and resulting employment. She will study female refugee populations lived experiences and the development of the IRC Economic Empowerment program development in New York City through regional and headquarters offices. She will focus on how IRC programs later affect refugee women’s perception of family life, self-sufficiency, and personal autonomy […]
Lupita Lúa
In 2015, Afro-Mexicans were recognized as an ethnic group in the Mexican national census for the first time in history. However, their history continues to be suppressed by the state and few studies address the role that Afro-Mexican people, especially women, played during Mexicos struggle for independence. For her History senior thesis, Lupita will travel to Mexico to conduct archival research in order to understand to what extent African-descendant peoples were active participants in the independence movement, and in what ways Afro-Mexican women embraced or resisted the ideas that the […]
Jeremy Teman
Activities like driving demand the ability to respond quickly and accurately to changes in ones environment. A fundamental scientific question concerns what neural processes determine response time (RT). A widely held assumption is that RT represents the aggregate time required to generate an accurate movement. However, recent research suggests that humans can be forced to accurately produce movements more rapidly than their fastest voluntary RTs. Inhibition of the motor system is known to be involved in motor planning processes during the performance of voluntary RT tasks, which raises the question: […]