UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Four Penn State faculty members were recently named the Social Science Research Institute’s (SSRI) Mentored Faculty Fellows for 2024-25. The Mentored Faculty Fellows Program supports the career development of early career Penn State faculty in social and behavioral sciences to engage in new areas of research and/or the development of new interdisciplinary collaborations aimed at building sustainable research and securing external funding.

The 2024-25 SSRI Mentored Faculty Fellows are:

Sydney Axson, assistant professor of nursing, Nese College of Nursing — "Exploring the feasibility of mobile eye-tracking to study informed consent in older adults"

• Axson’s fellowship will be used to gain expertise in implementing eye-tracking methodology into clinical research settings with older adult participants and leverage newly gained expertise to plan and launch a pilot study exploring the feasibility of utilizing mobile eye-tracking equipment to study informed consent in older adults.

Stephen Mainzer, assistant professor of landscape architecture, College of Arts and Architecture — "Water Quality? Establishing a Baseline of Collective Identity and Experimental Messaging in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed"

• Mainzer’s fellowship will leverage a novel transdisciplinary collaboration representative of socio-behavioral, communication, and ecological perspectives toward framing the problem of water quality in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed (CBW)

Harold Lee, assistant professor of biobehavioral health, College of Health and Human Development — "Understanding Heterogeneity in Behavioral Interventions through the Integration of Genetics, Metabolomics, and Latent Class Modeling"

• Lee’s fellowship will expand on his training in latent class modeling-a tool for data-driven phenotyping-and metabolomics, with the overarching goal of understanding response heterogeneity in behavioral intervention.

Chardée Galán, assistant professor of psychology, College of Liberal Arts — "Moving Towards the Prevention of Racism: A Novel Anti-Racist Parenting Program for White Families"

• Galán’s fellowship will address the underexplored avenue of anti-racist interventions for white parents and families for addressing racial-ethnic disparities.

Over the past 15 years, the SSRI Faculty Fellows Program has supported 56 faculty members from nine colleges and 21 departments and continues to make significant contributions to the institute’s research portfolio at Penn State. More information, including the application process, can be found on the SSRI Faculty Fellows program website page.