CRRES Graduate Affiliate J’Mauri Jackson received the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Award for her proposed research on the mental health of students racialized as Black, Indigenous, and as people of color (BIPOC).
The GRFP is awarded to “outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.” Recipients “are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering.”
J’Mauri’s project is titled “Reconciliation through Shared Oppression: An Intersectional Analysis of BIPOC Students' Help-seeking Behaviors.” Her work addresses the mental health crisis in universities, asking why, despite poor mental health outcomes, students underutilize on-campus psychological services, with this difference being disproportionately large for students racialized as Black, Indigenous, or as people of color. To address mental healthcare underutilization among BIPOC students on college campuses, she proposed a mixed-method study that uses survey and interview data.
A snapshot from her project reads:
“Research on institutional racism suggests that institutional bias and discrimination may cause mental distress among BIPOC students and contribute to their underutilization of mental healthcare by undermining the kind of trust in institutions that are necessary for help-seeking. Therefore, I ask (1) how are BIPOC students’ perceptions of on-campus psychological services related to their experiences with discrimination on campus? and (2) how do these perceptions inform racial, gender, and class disparities in help-seeking behaviors among BIPOC students?”
Congratulations J’Mauri!