The Hunt Fellowship at Work
We first introduced the Hunt Fellowship in our 2006 Spring Newsletter. Professor Earl “Buz” Hunt and his wife Mary Lou Hunt created the Earl (Buz) and Mary Lou Hunt Endowed Fellowship for Graduate Students in Psychology to provide an option for graduate students who are conducting independent research outside their advisor’s grants. The inaugural Hunt Fellowship was awarded to two developmental psychology students, Berit Olsen Martin and Tami Rigterink. Each will receive a tuition waiver, health insurance, and a stipend for one quarter.
Berit Martin - Berit is a sixth year developmental student whose primary advisor is Betty Repacholi. Berit's dissertation uses a NICHD data set of attachment measures collected on children studied from birth to nineth grade to understand the basis of discrepancies in long accepted measures of attachment in infants and toddlers (thought to all measure one construct) and determine whether any of these attachment measures (or their components) are accurate predictors of children's behavior later in life. While professor Repacholi studied attachment as a graduate student, her work (and her research funding) have moved well away from this topic. Because her attachment research cannot be covered by current lab funding, Berit's work is a perfect fit for the Hunt Fellowship. Berit hopes to complete all analyses and prepare a complete draft of her dissertation by the end of Summer 2010 and defend her dissertation in Fall 2010.
Tami Rigterink - Tami is a fifth year developmental student. Her primary advisor is Lynn Fainsilber Katz. Tami's dissertation research examines the effects of exposure to intimate partner violence on the sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal activity in children. This is an entirely new direction for intimate partner violence research for the Katz lab and is not covered by any current grants. Tami's work is well underway. She will complete data collection in Summer 2010 and plans to defend in either Fall 2010 or Winter 2011.
Congratulations to both students and many thanks to Buz and Mary Lou (pictured above with family), for their amazing generosity and commitment to independent, original research by our graduate students!