First-Gen Scholars Research Program

Janett Barragán Miranda

Today, 1 in 4 Latinas/os/xs face food insecurity in the U.S., despite decades of efforts to help the community access nutritious foods. My research explores the history of food insecurity in the Latina/o/x community, emphasizing how the community has created its own solutions when federal and private efforts fell short of ending hunger. My research links the Chicano Movement with the struggle for food justice and highlights the work of activists who dedicated their efforts to securing food with dignity for the community. Leading up to the 1960s, the community encountered situations where they were wrongfully denied federal food assistance, deported if they participated in public assistance programs, offered unlivable wages, and left to confront hunger and malnourishment on their own. In my research, I analyze archival materials and conduct oral history interviews to gather data about the history of food justice. I have found that in the 1960s, Latinos took to the streets to march, boycotted and fasted, and also used the courts to sue the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to draw attention to the injustices faced by the Latina/o/x community.

Students working on this research project will have the chance to work directly with primary sources, mainly the Hispanic Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (HHANES), which was conducted between 1982 and 1984. Alternatively, students can conduct research reports about current food justice efforts that affect the Latina/o/x community. Students will meet regularly, write reports, and develop a critical analysis of food justice and the Latina/o/x community from the past and present. Since students will be working directly with me, my mentorship aims to help them achieve their short- and long-term goals.

Adam Dolezal

The Dolezal lab studies how bee physiology and behavior are affected by the stressors they encounter in their environment, namely pathogens, pesticides, and nutritional deprivation. By taking an integrative approach, we can study how these factors interact with each other at the landscape, colony, and individual scale. We mostly focus on honey bees, but also are interested in studying how these factors affect other pollinators.

Undergraduates in the lab work on a variety of projects, but most work on experiments studying how pathogens, pesticides, or nutrition affect honey bee or wild bee health and resilience. This can include work on live animals (bees) performing bioassays and behavioral observation experiments, as well as work identifying and cataloging specimens for analysis. Students often also perform laboratory tasks such as DNA/RNA extractions, quantitative PCR, etc.

By joining our lab, the selected student will gain lab gain skills in teamwork, organization, the scientific method, and data analysis. You will also learn about insect/bee biology and how bees operate in modern agricultural and conservation contexts and will gain skills in insect bioassays and laboratory methods used to study bee behavior, physiology, and pathology.

Chadly Stern

Economic inequality is a pervasive, problematic, and ever-expanding aspect of societies across the globe. For example, in the United States men make more money than women, and white Americans have more wealth than Black Americans. Despite the prevalence of inequality, people disagree in its scope and size. These disagreements generate tension and undermine the development of interventions that would ameliorate financial disparities. Why do people fail to see eye-to-eye in their understanding of how large economic inequality is? In the Political Ideology and Groups lab we broadly explore how people’s political beliefs (e.g., how liberal or conservative they are) correspond to their understanding of the world. In one current research project we are examining whether people’s political beliefs help explain how large (or small) they view economic inequality as being. We also investigate how the perceived magnitude of economic inequality varies across social groups (e.g., race, class, religion) and countries.

Students who join the project will learn basic aspects of how to conduct research, including the development of research questions and hypotheses, submitting IRB (ethics) applications, programming surveys (e.g., using Qualtrics), using online data-collection platforms, analyzing data (e.g., using R), and presenting research findings. Students might also assist with other common aspects of research, including literature reviews and coding of participant responses. This project is best suited for students interested in topics including fairness, justice, and politics. Overall, assisting in this project will provide students with a solid foundation for conducting behavioral science research.

Rachel Garthe

Violence is public health crisis and a leading cause of death among youth. However, a growing body of scholarship has highlighted research and evidence-based practices that demonstrate violence can be prevented. The Violence Prevention Research Lab studies the development and prevention of violence, including dating violence and intimate partner violence, bullying, cyber-victimization, stalking, sexual violence, and other forms of violence during adolescence and young adulthood. My research studies are: 1) working with state agencies to examine violence prevention programs and policies across Illinois; 2) evaluating the impact of domestic violence and sexual assault prevention programs; and 3) developing an app capability to better support survivors of gender-based violence.

A student can be involved in one or all three of the ongoing projects. They may be asked to review policies in Illinois that address violence prevention (e.g., school bullying or teen dating violence prevention policies), assist with data analysis of focus group, interview, and survey data of domestic violence and sexual assault prevention programs, or participate in discussions with an interdisciplinary team of scholars developing an app capability. The student will learn skills in leading literature reviews, conducting descriptive and inferential statistics, and writing reports for state agencies and community-based organizations.

Tuyet Mai Hoang

In the USA, the maternal and infant health crisis does not only impact birthing people, but it has intergenerational consequences on families and communities, as evidenced by rising rates of adverse birth outcomes, increased mood symptoms among family members, and rising infant mortality rate for the first time in 20 years. My research focuses on these serious, interrelated systemic challenges of the perinatal health and reproductive inequities through the lens of critical intersectionality theory. My research approach uses critical intersectionality theory and community-based participatory research (CBPR) to investigate racial gendered health inequities and ensure that interventions reflect the lived experiences of the most vulnerable populations. Students who join the lab gain hands-on experience in research design, data collection and analysis, community engagement, and scholarly dissemination while co-creating projects that center lived experience and racial justice.

Students that join my group will learn about conducting research and understanding its impact at a broader level or a granular level. Students can participate as full research team members, including attending lab meetings, helping plan study workflows, conducting literature reviews and policy scans, refining research questions, and contributing to manuscripts and posters. OR students can choose to learn at a granular level to work on project-level tasks such as drafting IRB protocols and consent materials, designing and managing surveys in REDCap, cleaning datasets, and running descriptive analyses, co-developing interview and focus-group guides, conducting interviews and supervising transcription, and performing thematic coding and qualitative analysis. In addition, students engage directly with community partners to organize stakeholder meetings and co-create dissemination products (one-pagers, community reports) and receive mentorship in professional development activities like preparing poster abstracts, co-presenting findings.

Rachel Hoopsick

For many of us, a large portion of our days is spent working. The average person will spend about one-third of their life at work, making work a critical determinant of health and well-being. With over 20 million people employed in the healthcare sector in the United States, the pandemic has underscored the importance of work-related stress and its effects. Our research team is currently working on a project that explores the impact of social and environmental factors on the mental health, substance use, and suicidality of healthcare workers, particularly those in lower-wage occupations who often have fewer resources and supports. Using a public health lens, our team will investigate the role of workplace programs, policies, and practices in either mitigating or exacerbating these challenges, aiming to identify ways to create safer and healthier work environments. This project is well-aligned with students who have interests in public health, epidemiology, and the social and behavioral sciences.

Our team welcomes, values, and accommodates diversity, including that of people with experience with mental illness and substance use. Students on our research team will get exposure to various aspects of the research life cycle: idea generation, conducting literature reviews, addressing ethical issues related to working with human research participants, recruiting participants, collecting and managing data, and disseminating findings. Many of the students who have worked with our team have co-authored peer-reviewed publications and presentations at national conferences. Students working with our team can expect to engage in quantitative research, get experience working with a multidisciplinary team, and develop an understanding of public health (i.e., the science and art of population-level disease prevention and health promotion).

Kyungwon Koh

As artificial intelligence reshapes our world, the critical question is: Which uniquely human capabilities and experiences will matter most in the future? While machines handle more digital and analytical tasks, a vital set of human capacities becomes ever more valuable—what we call hands-on intelligence.

Hands-on intelligence blends embodied knowledge (learning through physical practice), emotional adaptability (responding with empathy and creativity), and practical problem-solving (turning ideas into tangible outcomes). It reflects the powerful link between thinking and doing—the knowledge in a potter’s hands, an engineer’s spatial reasoning, or a community organizer’s ability to read a room and respond with care. These capacities ensure that, even amid rapid technological change, we preserve our agency, creativity, and sense of purpose.

The Hands-On Intelligence Project brings together researchers to study and advance these capacities through real-world practice. Based at the CUC Fab Lab Research Network at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, participants will engage in community-focused projects, applying social science methods, design research, and community-engaged approaches. The goal is to understand and demonstrate how hands-on intelligence strengthens communities, builds resilience, and expands opportunities for all. By bridging theory and practice, the project shows how human ingenuity—grounded in both mind and hand—remains indispensable in the age of AI.

Curtis Mason

My research interests broadly span two areas. The first is historical inquiry in U.S. education, including how teaching has been affected by social and political movements. I am particularly interested in exploring how education policies are situated within historical and social contexts, who created policies, who was left out of those policymaking decisions, and how those policies affect teachers, students, and communities. My second major research area is higher education teaching and assessment practices. Here, I investigate practices that address issues of equity and fairness in the college classroom, including ways that faculty can build community across different teaching modalities.

Generally, students will work with me on projects that either investigate historical intersections of policy and schooling or investigate higher education teaching. I am open to keeping things flexible to the students’ interests and connecting to their topics within these areas, but I am also happy to collaborate with them on my specific projects.

Students working with me will gain insight into possible skills across a research project’s life cycle, including forming research questions, collaborating with other researchers, finding and synthesizing relevant scholarship, collecting and analyzing data, accessing and examining archival materials, and presenting findings to different audiences.

Mark Wolters

Teaching college students is not the same as teaching high school or elementary students. There are so many things that come into consideration when trying to improve the educational experience of college students, whether that is the content, the way information is shared, how instructors relate to their students, and much more. My research has focused on the idea that you have to be C.R.A.Z.Y. to be a successful and impactful business educator. C – Care for your students. R – have Real world examples to bring the topic to the students. A – Actual experience in the area one is teaching. Z – have Zeal in your teaching to improve the experience. Y – You (the educator) can make all the difference in a student’s educational journey. This project is focused on finding the most impactful ways that instructors can improve their students educational experience via their face to face teaching.

The research that the student will be taking part in will help collect and analyze data and previous research in the area of effective business and marketing education. This means the main areas of their participation will be 1. Reviewing previous literature in the area. 2. Doing field research and collecting data with myself via surveys and interviews. 3. Adding student insight into the exploratory research part of this project.

The student will gain skills in literature research, developing surveys, conducting interviews, and having a good grasp of what an academic research project entails. They will also have a better idea on how they could educate others if they were to go into the academic field.

Nidia Ruedas-Gracia

Sense of belonging is a critical human need and powerful motivator. Individuals who struggle feeling a sense of belonging to a specific context are more susceptible to experiencing mental health and physical health issues. College students who struggle feeling a sense of belonging to their university context are no exception and can also experience lower academic performance and even drop out of college. Our lab focuses on how sense of belonging is experienced by different minoritized populations (first-generation college students, racially/ethnically minoritized groups, etc.) and how it impacts important life outcomes. We also examine how sense of belonging contributes to mental and physical health disparities among minoritized populations. Our research lab is currently working on a project that explores the impact of university belonging on sleep, mental and physical health outcomes among diverse college students (racial/ethnic minoritized students, first-generation, commuter, etc.) and how this impact changes over a students’ time in college. We use different sources of data (daily diary self-report, actigraphy, biomarker) to explore our research questions.

Students in our lab will gain knowledge of how an academic research project progresses from study design to publication and be exposed to faculty and graduate students that can serve as future letters of recommendation/mentors. Students that work on this project will also learn valuable research skills (e.g., analyzing quantitative and qualitative data), strengthen their familiarity with important psychological topics pertaining to minoritized populations (e.g., racial and ethnic mental and physical health disparities), and gain experience in a research lab that is committed to social justice, employs diverse perspectives, and is focused on equity and opportunities for growth for all research team members and collaborators.