Gabriela Stein is a research grantee studying whether an intervention that aims to improve parental skill and confidence in having racial-ethnic socialization conversations increases their children’s ability to cope with discrimination and develop a strong racial and/or ethnic identity. She has mentored fourteen doctoral students, twelve of whom identified as students of color. Of her 84 peer-reviewed publications, 28 of these were first-authored by graduate students. Stein’s goals include more fully integrating financial justice into her mentorship and administrative leadership. With this award, Stein will advocate for systemic change at the department, college, and university levels to remove barriers for those with less financial stability than she experienced as a graduate student. Stein’s mentee, Casandra Gomez-Alvarado, is a Mexican American doctoral student in her second year at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Gomez-Alvarado’s goals include identifying cultural resources that support youth’s resiliency in the face of racial discrimination and developing facility with the quantitative, observational, and community engaged methods necessary to capture the culturally salient factors that influence youth mental health. Gomez-Alvarado will provide research assistance on Stein’s Foundation-funded project and use it to explore questions pertaining to parental influence on youth mental health outcomes. Stein will mentor Gomez-Alvarado in using observational designs. Gomez-Alvarado will employ this methodology to identify key cultural protective factors that make preparation for bias messages more effective for youth of color and to assess if this preparation results in better mental health outcomes for the youth.
With this award, Stein will advocate for systemic change at the department, college, and university levels to remove barriers related to financial challenges.
