Graduate student Mahogany Monette has received a highly competitive Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. The five year fellowship supports outstanding students pursuing advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The award is designed to enable students to become knowledge experts by providing resources to help advance their research, teaching, and innovation.
The Graduate Research Fellowship will support Mahogany’s work on the relationship between racial discrimination and a cluster of schizophrenia-like symptoms broadly referred to as schizotypy. “Previous research suggests that racial discrimination is a risk factor for schizotypy among Black people living in the United States,” Mahogany shared. “However, the existing literature is limited by reliance on broad survey measures of racial discrimination and psychosis,” she added.
Mahogany’s work will help to fill this gap in knowledge and provide a more nuanced view of the time course of experiences of discrimination and schizotypy symtoms. She plans to do this by leveraging technological developments in smart phone apps that periodically ask participants about their in-the-moment experiences. These participant reports will be augmented with information from electronically activated recorders that sample the ambient sounds a person is exposed to.
Mahogany says that she ultimately hopes “to use the results from these studies to develop culturally-competent, accessible assessments for racial trauma among Black Americans experiencing psychosis.”
Congratulations to Mahogany Monette on this prestigious award.