NIH Matilda White Riley Behavioral and Social Sciences Honors
Bernice Pescosolido, a distinguished professor of sociology at Indiana University, will deliver the annual Matilda White Riley Behavioral and Social Sciences Honors distinguished lecture for the National Institutes of Health’s Officer of Behavioral and Social Science Research. Four early-stage investigators will also deliver lectures on their work.
Pescosolido, a medical sociologist, is the founding director of the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research and of the Irsay Family Research Institute, which targets research in the sociomedical sciences. Her research focuses broadly on how social networks and culture provide insights into health, illness and healing phenomena, and more specifically on four areas – stigma, suicide, health care use, and health care systems. In particular, according to her institutional website, Pescosolido is concerned with how social and organizational networks facilitate or frustrate people’s responses to problems.
Every year since 2006, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, or OBSSR, hosts the event to commemorate the life of acclaimed gerontologist Matilda White Riley. In a rich career that saw her transition from market research to professorship at Rutgers and Bowdoin before joining NIH — at age 68 — White Riley headed social science-based research at the NIH’s National Institute of Aging and served as the institutes’ spokesperson for social and behavioral research. She left the NIH in 1998, at age 87, and died in 2004.
The event also honors early-stage researchers, four of whom will give talks:
Jeremy Luk | Clinical psychologist at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, will lecture on “A Person-Centered Approach to Capture Health Disparities and Multidimensional Impact of COVID-Related Stressors“
Kristin Perry | Postdoctoral fellow at Pennsylvania State University, will lecture on “Prenatal Tobacco, Tobacco-Cannabis Coexposure, and Child Emotion Regulation: The Role of Child Autonomic Functioning and Sensitive Parenting“
Gianna Rea-Sandin | NIDA T32 Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota, will lecture on “Novel Measures of Family Orientation and Childhood Self-Regulation: A Genetically Informed Twin Study“
Elyse Thulin | Research assistant professor at the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention at the University of Michigan, will lecture on “Longitudinal Effects of Electronic Dating Violence on Depressive Symptoms and Delinquent Behaviors Across Adolescence“
A fifth early-stage investigator, Associate Professor Vanessa Volpe at North Carolina State University, will give a lecture at a later date on “Gendered Racial Microaggressions and Emotional Eating for Black Young Adult Women: The Mediating Roles of Superwoman Schema and Self-Compassion“
