Tag Archives: social networks

Human Development has added two new faculty members this year, Misha Inniss-Thompson and Adam Hoffman.

Misha Inniss-Thompson

Misha Inniss-Thompson

Dr. Misha Inniss-Thompson received her doctorate in Community Research and Action at Vanderbilt University. She is an alumnus of Cornell's Department of Human Development (with minors in Inequality and Africana Studies) and was awarded the Jerome Holland Award for her achievements as a scholar and leader and was a Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Scholar.

Dr. Inniss-Thompson's work is concerned with shifting educational and social policies in ways that better support African-American girls. In particular, her research focuses on the impact of ethnic-racial socialization in shaping Black girls’ socioemotional wellbeing and academic outcomes. She has analyzed national education data and conducted interviews to understand the impact of these policies on the educational experiences of African American girls. Her report, Summary of Discipline Data for Girls in U.S. Public Schools: An Analysis from the 2015 - 2016 U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights Data Collection, has been cited by legal scholars and the 2019 documentary, Pushout, for bringing to light inequities in school policies that "push" African-American girls out of the school system. Dr. Inniss-Thompson is interested in using ecological systems theory and culturally relevant positive youth development models as a tool for understanding Black girls’ experiences during the transition from middle childhood to adolescence. She is passionate about centering youth voices in the research process through methodological approaches such as photovoice and youth participatory action research.

Adam Hoffman

Adam Hoffman

Dr. Adam Hoffman received his doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has been an assistant professor of psychology at Western Carolina University. Dr. Hoffman's research addresses the development of identities and how they change over time, the relationship between identities and mental health, well-being, and academic motivation, and how identities can be leveraged to promote positive youth development and outcomes. In addition, he has analyzed social networks to investigate how peers and friends influence adolescents' ethnic-racial identity development. Although research has demonstrated that social identity can promote a more positive sense of self, Dr. Hoffman is one of few researchers who have been developing interventions that capitalize on this asset.

Dr. Hoffman has studied the psychological experiences of adolescents from a wide range of ethnic/racial groups, including African American, American Indian, European French, European American, Latinx, and North African French adolescents in American and international communities. He received a Graduate Research Fellowship and a Graduate Research Opportunity Worldwide award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) which enabled him to study ethnic and gender identity development in French and North African French adolescents in Marseille, France.  For his dissertation, he developed a brief social-psychological intervention to promote STEM motivation and ethnic and gender identity among American Indian adolescents. Dr. Hoffman recently presented his research on child development within the Cherokee Indian community at the Carolina Consortium on Human Development - click here to watch his talk.

 

 

HD TODAY e-NEWS: Insights from Human Development's Research & Outreach

HD TODAY e-NEWS is a quarterly digest of cutting-edge research from the Department of Human Development, College of Human Ecology, Cornell University. Explore the HD Today e-NEWS website at http://hdtoday.human.cornell.edu/ and discover a wide range of resources:

The Department of Human Development welcomes 4 faculty members with research interests that include network science, social media, epigenetics, ecology, conceptual development and cultural diversity, and social cognition.

William Hobbs

William Hobbs received his doctorate in political science from the University of California at San Diego and comes to Cornell from Northeastern University where he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Network Science Institute. At Cornell, he has a joint appointment in Human Development and the Department of Government. A central feature of Hobbs' research is the use of complex relational data to study "the social effects of government policies, on how small groups of people adapt to sudden changes in their lives, and on low-dimensional representation (data that has been processed to reduce the number of random variables) of social interaction and language." [Read Dr. Hobbs' CV to learn more about his research.] One of his recent publications involved an analysis of the effect of interacting on social media networks specifically, Facebook, and longevity. [Read more about the study in a story by CBS News.]

Marlen Gonzalez

Marlen Gonzalez arrived at Cornell this summer after completing the Charleston Consortium Internship Program, a joint endeavor of the Medical University of South Carolina and the Ralph H. Johnson Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She received her doctorate from the University of Virginia (UVA), where she studied with Dr. James Coan and engaged in a truly diverse interdisciplinary research program, including, developmental psychology, neuroscience, epigenetics, evolutionary biology, and behavioral ecology. As a graduate student at UVA, Gonzalez was a LIFE Fellow from 2014-2017 which enabled her to study at UVA and at the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course in Berlin. The central question guiding Dr. Gonzalez's research is "How do our developmental environments, and especially our social environments, shape our nervous system and biobehavioral strategies for coping in adulthood."

bethany ojalehto

Bethany ojalehto has returned to her academic roots in Human Development and the College of Human Ecology. She graduated with honors (she received the Zuckerman award for best senior thesis in HD) from Human Ecology in 2008 having majored in psychology and human rights with a certificate of African Studies and was a mentee of HD Chair, Qi Wang. Her undergraduate years were funded by a number of prestigious scholarships, including, The Nancy and Andrew Persily Scholarship, the Merrill Presidential Scholar, and the Cornell Presidential Research Scholar. Upon graduation, ojalehto received a U.S. Fulbright Research Grant to Kenya, Law and Psychology and studied cognitive development in a Kenyan refugee camp. She completed her masters and doctorate at Northwestern University under the mentorship of Drs. Douglas Medin, Sandra Waxman, and Rebecca Seligman. As a graduate student she received a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Short-Term Fellowship for a study of “Cultural Models and Conceptual Development in a Ngöbe Community,” Panama. She was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for her dissertation and continued her work as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern. According to ojalehto, her research "explores how people conceptualize agency and ecologies, with a focus on cultural variation in social cognition and human-nature relationships." [Read more about Dr. ojalehto's research and outreach at website: http://sites.northwestern.edu/ojalehto/ and watch her presentation at the National Academy of Sciences Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium, Pressing Questions in the Study of Psychological and Behavioral Diversity].

Lin Bian

Lin Bian will join the Department of Human Development in January 2019 as the Evalyn Edwards Milman Assistant Professor. She is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Ellen Markman at Stanford University. Dr. Bian received her doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017 under the mentorship of Drs. Andrei Cimpian and Renée Baillargeon. Her research examines the development of social cognition, with an emphasis on children’s reasoning about social groups. In this vein, she has pursued two major lines of research: One line of work focuses on the acquisition and consequences of stereo- types about social groups for children’s interests and motivation. The other line of work focuses on infants’ and toddlers’ sociomoral expectations, especially as how they apply to behaviors within vs. across group boundaries. [Watch the NBC News video about Dr. Bian's research, Psychologist Breaks Ground with Gender Bias Study].