Doctoral Student, 10 Grad Students at Cal State Long Beach
Awarded Research Fellowships for 2012-13 Academic Year

A doctoral student and 10 master’s students at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) have been awarded Graduate Research Fellowships for the 2012-13 academic year,.

Now in its eighth year, the Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) was created by the university to provide much-needed financial support to graduate students conducting research and working on creative projects.  Each student will receive $4,500 at the beginning of the fall semester and an additional $4,500 in the spring.

“Many graduate students have to work to support themselves or take out student loans in order to complete their degree,” said Cecile Lindsay, vice provost and dean for graduate studies.  “Our goal in creating this $9,000 fellowship was to enable some of our highest-achieving graduate students to focus full-time on their study and research.”

Students were selected for the fellowship by faculty based on the strength of the proposed research or creative project, their outstanding academic achievements and the faculty mentor’s nomination.

The 2012-13 CSULB Graduate Research Fellowships were granted to the following students:

• Kirsten Byrne (M.S. civil engineering) is studying the effect of air and gas pocket entrapment on the hydraulic performance of sewerage pressurized pipelines. Faculty mentor: Antonella Sciortino;
   
• Christopher Beckom (MBA, business administration) is looking at small business employment policies and right of privacy concerns.  Faculty mentor: Dana McDaniel;
   
• Mindy DeYoung (M.S. industrial/organizational psychology) is looking into training job-seeking college students to avoid detrimental uses of social networking sites and ways of optimizing job marketability.  Faculty mentor: HanNah-Hanh Nguyen;
   
• Sarah Grefe (M.S. applied physics) is conducting an optical investigation of single particle QDs using a novel high resolution optical technique.  Faculty mentor: Yohannes Abate;
   
• Maria Theresa Hu (M.A. musicology) has titled her research “The Tenth Muse: Sappho Operas Lost in Time.”  Faculty mentor: Alicia Doyle;
   
• Allison Hunt (M.A. anthropology—applied option) is studying military sexual trauma (MST) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Faculty Mentor: Karen Quintilliani;
   
• Thanh Luong (M.S. math education) is looking at “Questions, Responses, and Assessment Tools Associated with Khan Academy Instructional Math Videos.”  Faculty mentor: Joshua Chesler;
   
• Jody Pritchett (Ph.D. engineering and industrial applied math; joint doctoral program with Claremont Graduate School) is researching machine vision and motion detection with applications to robotics.  Faculty mentor: Fumio Hamano;
   
• James Salassi (M.S. kinesiology—exercise science option) is studying data obtained during/after high intensity interval training of cardiac patients.  Faculty mentor: Ralph Rozenek;
   
• Danielle Slakoff (M.S. criminal justice) is looking into “Newsworthiness and the Missing White Woman Syndrome.”  Faculty mentor: Henry Fradella;
   
• and Ashlee Wilkins (M.S. counseling—student development in higher education option) is researching the experiences of African-American female undergraduate students partaking in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors.  Faculty mentor: Angela Locks.

“In some instances, receiving the award allows a master’s student to undertake a research thesis instead of a comprehensive exam, or it enables him or her to undertake a more ambitious research program,” Lindsay pointed out.  “Some excellent research and creative work has resulted from the program, and past GRF recipients have presented their work at regional and national conferences.”

All of this year’s recipients will submit a progress report in June 2013 highlighting the work they have done.

Lindsay noted that CSULB originally received funding to support graduate students from the CSU Chancellor’s Office, but when it decided to decentralize this funding to each CSU, campus officials decided to create the CSULB Graduate Research Fellowship, which was established in 2004 and gave out its first awards during the 2005-06 academic year.

CSULB offers 67 different master's degrees that prepare graduates for prestigious doctoral programs and careers in the public sector, industry, education and the arts. For more information on the Graduate Research Fellowship, call 562/985-8225.

-- Rick Gloady