CHD Faculty, Students and Alumni Winning Awards

CHD Faculty, Students and Alumni Winning Awards:

Prof. Eman Abdelhadi received the ASA Religion Section's Distinguished Article Award, for her article "Re-Examining Restructuring: Racialization, Religious Conservatism, and Political Leanings in Contemporary American Life" which was published in Social Forces in 2020 with John O'Brien (of NYUAD). 

Prof. Susan Goldin-Meadow won the Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. The David E. Rumelhart Prize is awarded annually to an individual or collaborative team making a significant contemporary contribution to the theoretical foundations of human cognition. 

Prof. Guanglei Hong received a John Simon Guggenheim foundation grant for her proposal on "Economically Vulnerable Youth during the Great Recession: Risks and Protections." Guanglei will be taking this year off but will return next year to take up a second term as Chair of the Committee on Quantitative Methods in Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences.

Prof. Margaret Beale Spencer was named the Charles F Grey Distinguished Service Professor. She also just won a NIH grant for her research on policing and vulnerable youth.

Helen Lee won the Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award, American Educational Research Association (AERA) Stress and Coping SIG for a paper based on her trial research that focused on the structural supports available for early career teachers. 

Our second-year student, Erika Prado, was the recipient of a Ford Foundation and an NSF  3-year predoctoral training grant to support her graduate work on Latinx autistic youth and assisted communication.  Erika also won Best Undergrad paper in the Society for Linguistic Anthropology’s undergrad essay contest.

Raffaella Taylor Seymour was the recipient of a Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship to fund the completion of her dissertation.  Entitled “Intimate Rites: Localizing Queerness through Ancestral Spiritualities in Contemporary Zimbabwe,” her thesis investigates how young people in Zimbabwe are developing new expressions of queerness through the reinvention of spiritual practices involving ancestors.

Emily Wilson’s essay, "Welcome to the Dementia Café,” a chapter from her soon to be completed dissertation on voluntarism, social care, and community-building across Northern England, was given second place in the Society for Applied Anthropology Peter K. New graduate student essay competition.  

Shruthi Vaidya won a Wenner Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork grant for her research proposal entitled "Interpreting and Enacting Sexuality: Intellectually Disabled People, “Special” Educators, and Expertise in India.”

Michael Chladek was promoted to Associate Director at Clinical Outcome Solutions.

Amy Cooper received tenure in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Saint Louis University; her book State of Health: Pleasure and Politics in Venezuelan Health Care under Chávez is out with the University of California Press.

Elizabeth Fein’s book Living on the Spectrum: Youth in Community, came out with NYU Press in 2020 and received an honorable mention for the Stirling Prize for the best book in psychological anthropology. She is now Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Duquesne University.

Christine El Ourdani received tenure and is now Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development at California State Long Beach.

Seamus Power was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen. Seamus is also head of graduate studies and notes that “this is considered a promotion here, and one of the main reasons is based on my transdisciplinary training in terms of methods and perspectives at CHD.”

Ben Smith received tenure at Sonoma State last year, where he singlehandedly directs a bustling program in Human Development with over 100 majors. 

Greg Thompson was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Anthropology at Brigham Young University.

Kim Walters was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of International Relations at California State Long Beach.

Jay Williams, who is Chief Diversity Officer and Adjunct Professor at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, was awarded the 2018-2019 Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Academic and Student Affairs award for Distinguished Diversity Leadership.

Gabe Velez, currently assistant professor in the College of Education at Marquette University, received the APA Division 5 Distinguished Dissertation in Qualitative Inquiry award for his dissertation entitled “Conceptualized Peace: A Study of Columbian Adolescents' Meaning Making and Civic Development”.