The Asian Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring is launched!

 

Professor Jean Rhodes to serve as Rudd Family Visiting Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

Through a generous gift of the Rudd Family Foundation, the Rudd Family Visiting Professorship was created in order to bring expertise to the UMass Amherst campus which would support the goals of the ongoing Rudd Adoption Research Program. We are pleased to announce that Professor Jean Rhodes, an internationally recognized expert on mentoring, has agreed to spend a week with our team in February 2020, especially focusing on one of our signature programs, the Adoption Mentoring Partnership. During the visit, Professor Rhodes will deliver public lectures, meet with mentoring program, review the AMP program’s goals, activities, and outcomes, and make recommendations about its direction for the short- and long-term.

The health dangers don’t stop with a hurricane’s churning. They can get worse.

By William Wan ,Lena H. Sun and Carolyn Y. Johnson
September 17

In coming weeks, long after Hurricane Florence’s winds and rains have faded, its aftermath will still pose life-threatening hazards: snakes, submerged sharp objects, bacterial infections and disease-carrying mosquitoes.
People are trapped by floodwaters and facing dwindling supplies of medicines, food and drinking water. Carbon monoxide poisoning is a danger as people crank up portable generators, and respiratory viruses will circulate in crammed shelters.
On Monday morning, in Maxton, N.C., Dan Lowry, 48, and his wife, Jewel, 51, trudged through the waist-high water around Dan’s father’s house, aware of the dangers around them.
“Yeah, there could be bacteria,” Dan said. “Or snakes.”
Both were wearing shorts. Their feet were bare. The sun had finally broken through the clouds, and they were going to check on their trailer, in the backyard.
Beside him, his wife shrugged in resignation. “What are you going to do?” she said.
Disaster experts categorize health hazards in the wake of disasters as short-term, midterm and long-term dangers.
The majority of people who die during or immediately after a storm die by drowning.

Click here to read more.

Kirsten Christensen

Kirsten Christensen awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Kirsten ChristensenKirsten Christensen, a second year clinical psychology student in the Rhodeslab, has been selected for a highly competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Kirsten plans to explore the long-term influence of high school coach support. This work will build on a study that Kirsten conducted, in which she drew on the Ad Health data to explore the prevalence and long-term associations of coach mentors. Building on this work, she will conduct a mixed-method study designed to further advance our understanding of the role of coaches in the lives of adolescents, and the factors that lead to their acquisition and long-term influence across youth of varying socioeconomic circumstances. She will also explore a wider range of developmental and midlife outcomes and make use of the forthcoming wave of Ad Health data.

Kirsten Christensen awarded UMass Beacon Fellowship

On May 2, several students and student organizations were honored at the 26th Annual Beacon Leadership Awards. Of the over 115 nominations, 17 awards were given across 11 categories.

https://www.umb.edu/news/detail/student_leaders_honored_at_beacon_leadership_awards

What Natural Disaster Survivors Can Teach All of Us About Resilience and Optimism

http://www.health.com/stress/post-traumatic-growth

“Rhodes recently spoke with Health about her research on Hurricane Katrina survivors, and about the field of post-traumatic grief in general. Here’s how she thinks it can inform our response to natural disasters and the support we provide to victims, as well as what survivors can do to increase their likelihood of recovery and resilience.”

After Hurricane Katrina, Many People Found New Strength

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/09/15/551339963/after-hurricane-katrina-many-people-found-new-strength

Thanks for coming!

Matt Hagler awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Matthew Hagler, a second year clinical psychology student in the Rhodeslab, has been selected for a highly competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.  Matt plans to explore the long-term influence of high school teacher support and the factors that lead to the acquisition of mentors among first generation students at UMB. Identifying barriers to (and strategies for) recruiting professor, staff, and other support is likely to shed important light onto how we might reduce attrition and improve retention of vulnerable students in STEM and related fields. In doing so, this work will make original and valuable contributions to fostering a more diverse, globally-engaged science and engineering workforce.

Matt’s proposal to study first-generation students at UMass Boston stems from his interest in the educational outcomes of vulnerable populations and the role of relationships in attenuating risk.  For his Master’s, Matt capitalized on data from the control group of a large, experimental evaluation to explore the acquisition of natural mentors in vulnerable youth. This resulted in an original contribution since previous studies of natural mentors have examined only the correlates and outcomes of pre-existing relationships, leaving the direction of influence unclear. His analyses, which highlighted the role of both risk and social competencies in students’ efforts to recruit help, have implications for both theory and intervention. Building on this study, we have been examining the ways in which social isolation and poverty conspire to limit students’ access to mentors. We drew on the national Adolescent Health data set. The results indicated that more impoverished students had fewer mentors, and that the mentoring that they did receive tended to be more kinship based, less focused on identity development, and less likely to provide bridges to new opportunities (Raposa et al., under review). Matt also led a study in which he drew on the Add Health data set to examine the particular role of teacher support. Remarkably, students who indicated that they had high school mentors were not only more likely to enroll in college, they were more likely to complete college (Hagler et al., in preparation). This suggests a new point of entry for interventions designed to improve the secondary educational outcomes of vulnerable students. Again, however, he found that across all indicators of neighborhood risk and student poverty, less advantaged students had fewer opportunities to connect with teacher mentors. As a follow-up, we are currently drawing on Gallup poll data to determine how disadvantage is perpetuated at the college level and how it might be redressed.

Matt plans to build on this growing body of work to collect his own data in an effort to better understand the long-term influence of high school teacher support and the factors that lead to the acquisition of mentors at the college level.

In Katrina’s Aftermath, Psychologists Find Trauma As Well As Resilience

Natural disasters and other traumatic events could be engines of growth.

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, forcing more than half a million residents to flee, psychologists are investigating the mental and emotional fallout of the natural disaster.

A series of longitudinal studies of Katrina survivors, featured this week in the journal Nature, paint a complicated picture of the storm’s repercussions for mental health.

Jean Rhodes’ interviewed for this article in the Huffington Post.

Hurricane Katrina’s psychological scars revealed

Mental health worsened in the disaster’s aftermath, but survivors also showed resilience. Professor Jean Rhodes was interviewed for this article. Click here to read more.

Professor Jean Rhodes receives 2015 Chancellor’s Distinguished Scholarship Award

UMass-Boston-2015-Cancellors-Award-for-Distinguished-ScholarshipThis award is based on the scholarly work that Professor Rhodes has presented to the public during the period of her association with UMass Boston. The Award recognizes the candidate’s work, as evidenced by peer recognition of its import and impact. Comparing scholarship and creative activity in the social science is a complex task. For this reason, the assessment of peers both internal and external to the campus carried particular weight in the award process, as was acknowledgments from her discipline, e.g., grant funding, impact. In addition to being an excellent scholar, Rhodes has demonstrated an ability to engage with others in her work, including undergraduate and graduate students.

Click here to view Jean Rhodes receiving the award.

Jean Rhodes and her colleagues receive Department of Justice Award to improve mentoring services for children of incarcerated parents.

news_oct2014University of Massachusetts Boston psychology professor Jean Rhodes, a nationally recognized expert on youth mentoring, has received a $2.5 million grant from the United States Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to develop and evaluate efforts designed to bolster the effectiveness of mentors working with children of incarcerated parents.

Rhodes, the Director of the MENTOR/UMass Boston’s Center for Evidence-based Mentoring, will lead a team of practitioners and researchers in youth mentoring as they develop and evaluate a demonstration program to increase the effectiveness of these mentors.

Read more.