The Walter Freedman and Karen Harrison Freedman Student Fellowships give undergraduate and graduate students funding to complete targeted digital projects under the guidance of Kelvin Smith Library's Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship Team. The Freedman Student Fellowship program provides undergraduate and graduate students the ability to partake in one of two opportunities, the internship track or the grant track. The 2020-2021 Freedman Student Fellows and their projects are detailed below.
Putting Risk on the Map: PTSD Treatment Trajectories Through a GIS Lens
Allison Baier is a clinical psychology doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychological Sciences. Her grant research uses geographic information system (GIS) technology and spatial analytic designs to examine the impact of neighborhood environments on treatment trajectories for patients with chronic posttraumatic stress disorder. A shift towards examining the impact of social determinants of health on treatment response may help elucidate why some patients do or do not respond to treatment thereby providing clinicians, researchers and policy makers with future directions for mitigating risk and augmenting treatment response.
Understanding Social Inequality in Cuyahoga County through Burn Injuries
Colette Ngana is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her research explores spatial-health relationship(s) and related social inequities. Risk of burn injury is known to follow race, class and gender lines. Using a mixed-methods approach incorporating geographic information systems (GIS) and qualitative interviews, this project will highlight the social-structural forces behind differential burn injury rates and outcomes in Northeast Ohio.
Simulation-Based Assessment for Executive Functions after Childhood TBI
Jessica Salley is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Sciences program in the Department of Psychological Sciences. Her research investigates the long-term impacts of childhood brain injury on academic and social participation, particularly for individuals in high-risk groups. This project will use virtual reality to create a simulated classroom environment to examine children’s executive functioning skills after brain injury in an ecologically-valid manner. The results of this project are anticipated to support the use of virtual reality simulations as sensitive and valid assessment tools to capture functional deficits after childhood brain injury.
Dynamics of Emergent Organization Formation in the Digital Age: Ongoing Work
Stormy Sweitzer is a PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management. Her grant research supports exploration of how Instagram users’ visual and textual communication and interactions enabled the emergence of the world’s largest women's motorcycle organization and an accompanying collective identity. Her funded research consists of two discrete efforts. First, she will further content analyze an extant set of publicly-available text and meta-data to ensure reliability of findings thus far. Secondly, she will collect a database of social media images and analyze them using both NVIVO and Excel.
Freedman Fellows Student Internship for the Silent Witness Project in collaboration with the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women
Varsha Krishnan is a second-year undergraduate student from Potomac, Maryland. She is pursuing a major in Nutrition and a potential minor in data science. After undergraduate studies, she plans to attend medical school, or become a registered dietician. On campus, she is involved with Women in Science and Engineering Roundtable (WISER), the Know Your Neighbors Campaign, and Students Meeting About Risk and Responsibility Training (SMARRT). She is also a member of the Alpha Chi Omega sorority, which promotes healthy relationships and domestic violence awareness. Varsha is excited to have received the Freedman Fellows Student Intern position for 2020-2021, and looks forward to advancing the Silent Witness Project’s initiative of raising awareness and support in the community for domestic violence survivors.