The William T. Grant Foundation has announced this year’s scholarship winners for promising early-career researchers working on methods to improve the lives of young people who have experienced poverty and other forms of hardship.
Among the five recipients are Riana Elyse Anderson, an assistant professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and William Schneider, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Social Work.
Each research scholar will receive $350,000, which they will use to conduct their research for the next five years. The goal is not only to add to the body of academic knowledge that can be put to use in the real world, but also to supercharge their development through relationships they’ll develop with specific project mentors as well as others in social science.
Anderson’s two-part project will look at how well a certain clinical intervention (EMBRace) works to help decrease the impact of racial discrimination on Black youth’s mental health.
Schneider’s work, which will tie administrative child welfare data with information from three Chicago employment and housing experiments, will study how housing and income support policies reduce or prevent child maltreatment, particularly child neglect, among families facing economic hardship. He’ll also examine the effects of marital status and child age.
