The Office of Research, Sponsored Programs & Grants and the Transdisciplinary Studies Program are pleased to announce the Crossing Boundaries Research Award Fellows for the 2022 – 2023 academic year. The six recipients and brief descriptions of their research projects are listed below. This is an impressive set of projects that illustrate the high-quality, high-impact research conducted across CGU. Congratulations!

Michelle Arch

School of Arts and Humanities

“‘There Was Somebody Else in Reserve’: The Neurobiology of Literary Doubles”

Using cognitive neuroscience and brain anatomy, this project situates clinical schizophrenia and its manifold symptoms in the context of nineteenth-century fiction to create an unforced paradigm for modern psychiatric studies and neuroscientific deductions in critical analysis. This assimilation of neuroscientific discernments with historical psychological depictions and literary criticism purports a formative alliance between psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and the humanist narrative and therefore enables a fully authenticated psychopathological narrative self.

Byengseon Bae

Division of Politics and Economics

“From Slavery to Present Racial Disparities in Health: Identifying Moderators and Mediators of Structural Racism for Health Policy and Interventions”

Cross political, historical, and public health boundaries as well as the domains of behaviorism and structuralism, our research project aims to reduce the detrimental effects of structural racism on the health of Black people in the United States. Using seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR), structural equation modeling (SEM), and instrument variable (IV) estimation, this project aims (1) to identify whether the share of the county slave population in 1860 is associated with present-day racial disparities in health and (2) to find moderators and mediators of structural racism on health disparities in order to inform policymakers what actions can be implemented to attenuate and prevent the detrimental effects of structural racism on present-day racial disparities in health.

Ann Marie Castleman

Division of Behavioral & Organizational Sciences

“Crossing the Global Divide: Exploring the Purpose, Use, and Contributions of Participatory Evaluation in the Global North and Global South”

Participatory evaluation (PE) includes stakeholders in the process of co-creating and implementing an evaluation. Previous research suggests that PE is primarily used as an evaluation capacity building tool to promote organizational learning and decision-making in the Global North while it is used in the Global South to promote empowerment and social transformation. This research projects aims to understand differences that may exist in the practice and study of PE internationally for decolonizing evaluation, learning from evaluation in the Global South, and commissioning evaluation in contexts where Western ways of thinking may not be relevant.

Shine Kim

School of Educational Studies

“Awareness of Power Imbalance: Reframing Academic Victimization in PhD Programs”

Academic victimization–harassment that occurs within academia–is widespread among doctoral students. Despite a growing body of research examining academic victimization from the student (victim) perspectives, there is little systematic analysis of academic victimization from the faculty (perpetrator) perspectives and power imbalance within graduate education programs. This research project aims to fill in this critical research gap by drawing on cross-disciplinary perspectives from psychology, sociology, management, education, and criminal justice to inform the development of policies and programs aimed at preventing and reducing the abuse of doctoral students in higher education.

Rainita Narender

Division of Politics and Economics

“Evaluating the Benefits of Post-Incarceration Services on Recidivism”

Reducing California’s staggering recidivism rates has persisted as the most prioritized yet challenging goal faced by the California Criminal Justice System (CCJS). A recent program geared to mitigate rising recidivism rates in California is the Specialized Treatment for Optimal Programming, STOP. This project investigates the populations that take-up STOP programming and if access helps reduce the likelihood of future re-offense.

Pamela Ogata

School of Community and Global Health

“Crossing Boundaries to Decode Health Inequities among Latinx an COVID”

The Latinx community continues to have the highest number of reported COVID-19 cases and death rates in the greater Los Angeles region indicating an apparent health inequity. In a cross-sector collaboration between a medical team at a community hospital and the University’s Economic and Epidemiology departments, this cross-disciplinary research project will uncover some of the factors associated with COVID-19 morbidity and mortality, and help identify the structural barriers and epidemiology factors underpinning health disparities in the Latinx community.

Again, congratulations on your accomplishments and we wish you a productive year with your research.