The National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families (the Center) small grant program aims to support the professional development of early career faculty at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) or Emerging Hispanic Serving Institutions. The Center provides awards of up to $2,500 to cover expenses that can enhance early career scholars’ professional growth as scholars and educators. In addition, grantees participate in professional development and networking events organized by the Center, such as training in applying an equity lens to research and conducting policy relevant research.
Read below to learn about our 2023 grant awardees and how they will use their awards to grow professionally.
2023 Professional Development Grant Awardees
Kristina Lovato, MSW, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Lovato’s scholarly work focuses on enhancing Latinx child and family well-being among immigrant families at risk of immigration enforcement and/or public child welfare involvement. She will be using the funding to attend the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Methods Institute (IQRMI) at the University of Maryland.
Mayra Puente, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of higher education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Puente is particularly concerned with college access, choice, transition, retention, and success issues for rural Latinx students and other institutionally marginalized student groups and communities. Dr. Puente draws on frameworks like Critical Race Theory, Latino Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Spatial Analysis, and Chicana Feminisms to address these pressing educational issues and enact social justice. She recently co-developed a Platicando y Mapeando methodology in educational research, which combines her multiple interests and expertise in critical raced gendered epistemologies, Chicana feminist methodologies, and geographic information systems (GIS). Her passion for higher education access and equity is driven by the educational barriers she faced as a first-generation college student from a Mexican immigrant farm working background and by her professional experiences as a higher education advocate in California’s San Joaquin Valley for rural Latinx students and families. She will be using the funds to attend the Esri User Conference, the worlds largest GIS conference.
Marisa Westbrook, MPH, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in Health Promotion at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health at Portland State University. Dr. Westbrook is a community-engaged researcher studying the impacts of the affordable housing crisis and urban inequity on mental health and wellbeing among low-income communities of color. Her ethnographic research projects examine the embodied experiences of housing insecurity and displacement pressure among Hispanic/Latinx immigrant families in changing neighborhoods. She will be using the funds to support her training and needed research hardware, she will be attending the Research Talk Qualitative Data Analysis Camp at UNC’s Odum Institute for Research in Social Science and will purchase materials for her fieldwork.
Past Professional Development Grant Awardees
Learn about our 2022 grant awardees and how they used their awards to grow professionally.
Gerilyn Slicker, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Dr. Slicker’s research interests are in early childhood policy, with a specific focus on investigating and evaluating the influence of federal, state, and local policies on children’s equitable access to early care and education. She used the funding to attend NCFR’s “How to be an Anti-Racist Researcher” webinar, an interactive mixed methods and qualitative research workshop offered at the University of Michigan, and to purchase software licenses for her qualitative work.
Carolina Valdivia, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Valdivia’s work explores how various forms of legal and social exclusion impact the lives of immigrant youth and their families, including their educational trajectories, mental health, and political participation. She used the funding to attend and participate in annual conferences of the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Irene Vega, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Vega’s broad areas of expertise are in Latinx sociology, educational inequality, international migration, and sociology of law. Her current book project examines the moral and racial logics that undergrid the U.S. immigration bureaucracy. She used the funding to attend the American Sociological Association’s annual conference.
Cynthia A. Wiltshire, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Texas at El Paso. Dr. Wiltshire’s work examines the relationships that exist between teachers and Hispanic children in early childhood education settings, specifically the associations between teacher stress, teacher warmth, and child outcomes in cognitive and socioemotional development. She used the funding to attend the 2023 American Educational Research Association conference and to purchase a new laptop that will be used for data collection activities related to her research.