ARPC faculty research awards foster groundbreaking and impactful scholarship in the areas of racial justice and/or decolonial practice and support faculty who show the capacity for great distinction in these research areas. 

Our Seed Grant supports early-stage work on a racial justice research project that will increase the project’s potential for external funding. During the grant tenure, Seed Grant recipients are expected to participate in a research workshop with an interdisciplinary cadre of colleagues, attend a workshop on identifying and applying for external funding, and submit at least one external funding proposal or fellowship application.

ARPC is currently accepting applications for 2023-2024:
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2023-2024 Recipient

Dr. Nicole Lorenzo (CAS, Psychology) is the inaugural recipient of ARPC’s Racial Justice Research Seed Grant. Concerned by the low enrollment of children from Latine communities in mental and behavioral health intervention programs, Dr. Lorenzo will be developing a study aimed at building community partnerships and identifying barriers and facilitators to behavioral parenting interventions in Latine families. As a result, she plans to create a set of culturally informed guidelines for Latine parents of preschool children:

Externalizing behaviors are the most common behavioral disorders in children that can be identified as early as toddlerhood, with impairments resulting in a cascade of negative outcomes. Families from Latine communities are less likely to seek and receive mental health interventions, and more likely to drop-out of behavioral parenting interventions once enrolled. Barriers to engagement include systemic and individual factors. Recent research supports the need to attend to historical and continued oppression and negative experiences of individuals with marginalized identities and how these experiences impact their decision-making around mental health care for themselves and their child. However, strategies toward increasing engagement of Latineparentswith early parenting interventions are largely unknown. The proposed study aims to addressthisproblem by developing community partnerships and identifying barriers and facilitators tobehavioral parenting interventions for Latine families. The project is expected to yield an initial set of culturally informed guidelines toward developing an adaptive BPI for Latine parents of preschool children with behavior problems, who have the lowest utilization rates among racial/ethnic minority populations in the US.