Funding Opportunities for Graduate Students

Amount

One $1,000 award.

Criteria

For a publishable research report, thesis, dissertation, or published article written while attending UCLA, by a UCLA graduate student relating to women, health, or women in health-related sciences. (Examples include medicine, biological and other sciences, public health, sociology of medicine, history of science, medical education, or health policy.) Multi-authored articles will be considered, as long as the applicant has made a significant contribution to the research.

To apply

The application must contain the following materials in hard copy only:

Three copies of each:

• Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, Award Cover Sheet
• Paper or article (publishable research report, thesis, dissertation, or published article)
• Curriculum Vitae
• Transcripts (unofficial copy is acceptable)

One copy of:

• Letters of recommendation from two faculty members. The letters should be sealed in an
  envelope with the recommender’s signature across the back flap.

Deadline

5:30 PM
Thursday, March 4, 2010

Shonali M. Choudhury

Shonali M. Choudhury received her Ph.D. in May 2009 in the Department of Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health and a subconcentration in Women’s Studies. She specializes in health promotion among marginalized women, reproductive health, and the application of feminist research methods in public health. For her dissertation research she spent extensive time working in the field with women in the commercial sex industry in Tijuana, Mexico. She receives the Blackwell Award for her paper, “‘As Prostitutes, We Control Our Bodies’: Perceptions of Health and Body in the Lives of Establishment-Based Female Sex Workers in Tijuana.”

Sonja Kim

Sonja Kim received her Ph.D. in the Korean History program in December 2008 and is currently a visiting lecturer in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. She will take a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at SUNY Binghamton in the Fall of 2009.  Her Blackwell Award–winning article, “‘Limiting Birth’: Birth Control in Colonial Korea (1910–1945),” was published in East Asian Science, Technology and Society (2008).

Cleopatra Abdou

Cleopatra Abdou received her Ph.D. in social health psychology, with a minor in quantitative psychology, from UCLA in June 2008, and is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health. Her research integrates principles and methodologies from the areas of social psychology, stress physiology, and health disparities from a cross-cultural perspective to investigate mechanisms whereby culture and social identities impact healthcare decision-making and health outcomes among minority women and their children across the socioeconomic strata. Her specialized interests are in maternal-child health and in the impact of social identity threat on health-related decisions. She examines four core questions in these two related areas of research: 1) what are the intrapersonal and interpersonal processes whereby social identities, like ethnicity and social class, translate into health? 2) what are the cultural bases of behavior that impact healthcare decisions? 3) how do social identities and cultural beliefs interact to shape stress exposure and the availability of coping resources? and 4) what features of culture promote being healthy and living well? Abdou’s research also examines broader theoretical and measurement issues surrounding the study of culture, socioeconomic status, and health in different ethnic groups and in African Americans in particular. She received the Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D. Award for her paper, Communal Cultural Orientation Predicts Maternal Prenatal and Postpartum Health Better than Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Status, in which she examines the relative and synergistic contributions of ethnicity, childhood socioeconomic status, adulthood socioeconomic status, and cultural orientation to mental and physical health in expectant and new African American and European American mothers. Her findings suggest that endorsement of communal cultural values early in pregnancy robustly predicts maternal health over the course of pregnancy and up to two months postpartum; and, more broadly, that cultural mechanisms may prove critical to advancing understanding of ethnic and socioeconomic health disparities. 

Edwin Valladares

Rene Almeling

Rene Almeling is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UCLA, where she is working on a dissertation entitled “Selling Genes, Selling Gender: Egg Agencies, Sperm Banks, and the Medical Market in Genetic Material.” Her broad research interests include gender, economics, and medicine. More information is available at http://almeling.bol.ucla.edu/.

A. Janet Tomiyama

Ellen Setsuko Hendriksen

Ellen Setsuko Hendriksen is a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at UCLA. Her paper, “Predictors of Condom Use Among South African Youth Age 15-24: The RHRU National Youth Survey,” which is in press with the American Journal of Public Health, demonstrates the disproportional burden of HIV prevalence among young women in South Africa in the broader context of gender issues that young women face related to economic and educational opportunities, partner violence, and control of their own reproductive health.