Our research team developed and implemented a fellowship training program for
students. Students applied from multiple programs across the university. Utilizing Minn-LInK requires intensive training, which we provided for 5 graduate students and one postdoctoral student. Students were mentored to develop their own projects, prepare policy briefs, presentations, and publications on their work.
One undergraduate also carried out a project as part of our project, utilizing data from the Minnesota Student Survey. The Fellows have already made presentations to our broad team, research groups, classes, and conferences, with more planned. The Fellows will be presenting their work at our 2020 conference as well.
Fellow Bios
Max Herzberg
Max Herzberg is a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development where he received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology. He is now a postdoctoral research scholar at Washington University School of Medicine where he researches the links between brain development and the emergence of mental illness during childhood and adolescence. His work with the Homework Starts with Home Grand Challenge project has focused on the role of community organizations and housing subsidies in student’s school attendance. To do so, Max has leveraged administrative data from educational and housing-related sources and the presence of supportive community non-profits as a proxy for community social support.
Sun-Kyung Lee
Sun-Kyung Lee is a doctoral candidate in the Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota. She received her MEd in Educational Measurement and Statistics at Korea University. Sun-Kyung’s primary research interests are family effect on child development, bidirectional relationship between parenting and child adjustment, and enhancing high-risk family well-being via family-based preventive intervention program. As an HSWH Fellow, Sun-Kyung integrated 10-year of education and human service administrative data (Department of Education & Department of Human Services) to identify heterogeneity within students who experienced homelessness and what predict their high school graduation.
Warren Lowell
Warren Lowell is currently a PhD student in the joint degree program with the Public Policy and Sociology departments and a graduate research assistant at the Center for Family and Child Policy at Duke University. He received a B.A. in Psychology from Cornell University in 2014 and a Masters in Public Policy from the University of Minnesota in 2019. Since leaving Minnesota, Warren has continued to work on projects related to housing insecurity and child wellbeing including research on the impacts of eviction on school and health outcomes of children. He’s also currently working on projects focused on the upstream, macro-level impacts of housing policy and private market dynamics on evictions and gentrification both nationally and locally in Durham, North Carolina.
Alyssa R. Palmer
Alyssa R. Palmer is a 5th-year doctoral candidate on the developmental psychopathology and clinical science track at the Institute of Child Development, at the University of Minnesota. Alyssa’s general research interest includes processes that are related to effective parenting behaviors as well as adoptive parent and child adaptive emotion regulation in contexts of adversity. Alyssa’s work with the Homework Starts with Home Grand Challenge Project has focused on the intersection between children’s experiences of housing instability and child protective services.
Fanita Tyrell
Fanita Tyrell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her PhD in Developmental Psychology, with a minor in quantitative methods at the University of California, Riverside and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. Her research program seeks to elucidate processes of risk and protection among ethnic-racial minority and adversity-exposed populations as they operate within broader cultural contexts. Her current project with HWSH looks at the effects of homelessness on students’ school disciplinary outcomes.
Weston Merrick
Weston Merrick is a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and a MinnLink fellow from 2018 to 2019. His dissertation research explores how the design and behavioral sciences can be used to reduce administrative burdens in public service delivery. Weston also leads Minnesota Management & Budget’s Impact Evaluation Unit, a team of social and data scientists that uses scientific insights and methods to understand the impact of state investments in human services. He holds a Master’s in Public Administration from Indiana University and Bachelor’s in Business Administration from the University of Missouri.
Minn-LInK Briefs Featuring Fellows’ Projects
Read more about the Fellows’ projects in their Minn-LInK Research Briefs:
Minn-LInK Brief #42
Leveraging a Researcher-Practitioner Partnership to End Student Homelessness
Minn-LInK Brief #43
Who is Homeless in School? Evaluating Overlap and Outcomes of Student Homelessness
Minn-LInK Brief #44
Emergency Housing, Transitional Housing, and Child Welfare in the Twin-Cities Metro
Minn-LInK Brief #47
Effects of housing subsidies and community social support on school attendance
Minn-LInK Brief #58
Profiles of Risk Among Students Experiencing Homelessness