Graduate Students Win Several SRCD Dissertation Awards

January 13, 2015 – The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) recently named three award winners at Georgetown. Congratulations to all of the winners!

SRCD Outstanding Dissertation Award 

Dr. Natalie Brito received the Outstanding Dissertation Award and is currently at Columbia University as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar.

Read about Dr. Brito’s dissertation.

SRCD SECC Dissertation Research Funding Awards

Anna Markowitz (mentor: Ryan) and Laura Zimmerman (mentor: Barr) received Dissertation Research Funding Awards.  

Anna’s dissertation examines the role of school connection and educational policy in youth’s social and emotional development. It uses rigorous econometric techniques to (1) assess the potentially causal links between students’ connection to school and their social and emotional behavioral outcomes, (2) explore whether this influence is moderated by age and socioeconomic status, and (3) uses a counterfactual interrupted time series design to identify whether No Child Left Behind has influenced youth’s reported connection to school. 

Laura’s research will focuses on age-related changes in visuospatial working memory (VSWM) in early childhood. VSWM is the ability to maintain and update spatial information (i.e. location) and visual information (i.e. color or shape) for a short time. Her dissertation will use near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to examine the neural correlates of VSWM on a touchscreen task in children under 5. NIRS is a non-invasive imaging technique that has been used with infants and young children to measure changes in blood oxygenation that are caused by neuronal activity.