Grant Awards

Jay Plasman, Assistant Professor, Department of Educational StudiesJay Plas

This project collaboration with Johns Hopkins University will explore the specific mechanisms that ultimately impact the labor market outcomes of students who progress through career and technical education (CTE) programs of study in the Baltimore Public School District system. The project team will explore how admission into, and participation in, specific labor market programming in CTE schools with varying degrees of selectivity and focus facilitates progression along the education pathway and into the labor market. The project will examine whether and how CTE participation can help prepare students for college and careers related to their CTE studies.

Matthew Brock, Associate Professor

The LEADERS grant will fund a cohort of five Ph.D. students to study severe disabilities and advanced research methods. This program focuses on studying special education for students with intellectual disability, on the autism spectrum, or with multiple disabilities who have intensive support needs. Students will be trained and advised by leading faculty experts in severe disabilities, advanced quantitative methods, and complex communication challenges. Students will also have opportunities to attend national conferences in special education and receive training and consultation from experts at other universities.

Belinda Gimbert, Associate Professor, Educational Studies

The HELPERS project team is partnering with several schools and community organizations to improve instruction for English learners (ELs) and bilingual learners. The team will provide training and professional development resources to K-12 pre-service and K-8 in-service teachers, including implementing a Response to Intervention for ELs — small group instructional practice, for hybrid and virtual learning contexts. The team will also train pre-service teachers on bilingual and ESL licensure attainment and will promote literacy to improve parent, family, and community engagement. The project aims to improve English language and literacy proficiency and academic achievement among students. It also hopes to build capacity for educators and families to implement evidence-based and technology-supported EL instructional practices with fidelity.

Rebecca Parker, Program Lead of Learning, School Leadership, & Professional Development

This project supports new career technical education teachers within rehabilitation and corrections through services including assistance with license program enrollment, coursework continuation, classroom observation and feedback. Teachers are also assisted with the license process for the required end-of-resident education assessments. The project team provides professional development opportunities to other groups within the adult correctional field as well, including mentor groups, adult education programs, and other entities seeking career technical licensure information and teaching expertise. The program offers career and technical education experts with teacher education proficiency to prepare these experts to update, maintain, and deliver materials used to train the teachers enrolled in the program. The team has dedicated associates to develop and present curriculum packages and educational instruction with detailed assessment, evaluation, and standards to meet the needs of the licensure coursework.

Martha Belury, Professor, Human Nutrition

Approximately one in four adults in the US have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a condition that accompanies central obesity, type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic diseases plaguing people in the United States. Therapies that reduce fat accumulation in the liver also reduce risk for cardiometabolic diseases; yet, other than weight loss, there lack effective lifestyle therapies that effectively and safely reduce ectopic lipid accumulation in the liver. Dietary oils rich in the bioactive fatty acid, linoleic acid (LA), are reduce waist circumference or visceral adipose, improve glycemic control or insulin sensitivity and reduce risk for type 2 diabetes. Our central hypothesis is that soybean oil supplementation reduces ectopic fat in the liver without altering total body weight while improved cardiometabolic risk markers in adults with NAFLD.

Christopher Zirkle, Associate Professor, Department of Educational StudiesChristopher Zirkle

This grant from the Ohio Department of Education provides funding to support the licensure program in career and technical education in Workforce Development and Education. Activities funded by the grant include a summer workshop for new career-technical education teachers and outreach and technical assistance to more than 30 Ohio school districts, including onsite teacher mentoring.

Dean Lillard, Professor, Consumer Sciences

The project will explore the economic and social effects the mitigation policies and information environment that COVID-19 spawned. We will link those policies to data from ongoing household-based panel studies from 10 countries and rich administrative data from an eleventh. We will exploit the substantial intra and inter-country temporal and geographic variation in non-pharmacological intervention policies induced by the COVID-19 disease. That variation, coupled with pre-COVID baseline levels or long-running trends in the outcomes we will study, will identify the effects of the mitigation policies. Project Details