Achievements

Publications and achievements submitted by our faculty, staff, and students. 

 

Faculty Brandilynn Villarreal, Kimberly Vincent-Layton, Edelmira Reynoso, Kayla Begay and Kimberly N. White Native American Studies Despite having expertise, student voices have typically been left out of faculty professional development literature. The purpose of this study was to center college student voices around perceptions of equitable learning environments for use in faculty professional development programs.  Results revealed students and faculty had similar perceptions and both endorsed the importance of equitable classroom practices. Using content analysis to generate themes, students identified instructor responsibilities to promote learning environments that are: (1) caring and supportive, (2) safe and equitable, (3) individualized, (4) student-centered, and (5) active and collaborative.

Submitted: September 30, 2022

Faculty Sara L. Chase Merrick Child Development Dr. Sara L. Chase Merrick received a $400,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation to build on her previous research-practice collaborations with the Hoopa Tribal Education Association, and expand the resurgence of Na:tinixwe Mixine:whe (Hupa Language) and Na:tinixwe approaches to education. The project will utilize Na:tinixwe methodologies to investigate how current short-term language and education resurgence efforts can be developed into an effective long-term program.  Research will be grounded in the specificity of the Na:tinixwe (people) and Na:tinixw’ (place), yet have implications for Indigenous contexts across the world, endangered language communities, and Education research-practice.

Submitted: September 30, 2022

Faculty Student Alumna Kathleen Brewer and Faculty Emerita Dr. Mary Gruber Psychology Student Alumna Kathleen Brewer and Faculty Emerita Dr. Mary Gruber published their peer-reviewed Professional manual for the Parent Reaction to Autism Diagnosis Scales (PRADS-2) with guidance for tailoring parent supports.  It is available at https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/textbooks/7/ and also as a book through Amazon.  The manual describes their research, development, and validation of the scales, along with instructions for using them accurately, ethically, and beneficially in tailoring supports for parents.  Their manual also cites nine Humboldt graduate student thesis research studies on supports for caregivers of children with developmental disabilities. 

 

Submitted: September 23, 2022

Faculty Cyndy Phillips, Kyle Morgan, Jessica Welch, James Woglom English On September 3, Humboldt County will finally have its first published anthology of painters, Looking for Beauty: Humboldt’s Plein Air Community Shows Why Art Matters, designed and compiled by former associate faculty of English, Cyndy Phillips. Phillips' indie press, SequoiaSong Publications, worked with Cal Poly Press as an advisor over the span of the three and a half year project and community minded art professor, James Woglom, wrote the foreword. The opening reception for this historic publication is at the Redwood Art Association (603 F St, Eureka), 6-9pm, where the remaining 80 limited edition hardbacks will be for sale.

Submitted: September 15, 2022

Faculty Sara Sterner, Amy Conley Education Dr. Sara Sterner and Amy Conley received a grant from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing to support a dyslexia awareness program. The program will provide professional development for literacy educators, program leads, and supervisors, and will shape curriculum/assignment redesign of literacy coursework in the School of Education to include: 1) Dyslexia awareness, 2) Research-based screening procedures, and 3) multisensory phonics instruction. The program will be implemented with the help of various School of Education faculty, program leads, and supervisors.

Submitted: September 1, 2022

Faculty Joshua Zender Business Professor Joshua R. Zender was featured in WalletHub's piece about Balance Transfer Credit Cards. Read the piece here: https://wallethub.com/credit-cards/balance-transfer/#expert=Joshua_R._Zender
 

Submitted: June 8, 2022

Faculty Chris Aberson Psychology Chris Aberson published “BetterReg: An R Package for Useful Regression Statistics” in the Journal of Open Source Software (https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.04280). The article reports on a freely available tool for calculating a number of common statistical values that were not previously available for the R software platform.  The work stems from materials develop in Dr. Aberson’s Regression and Multivariate Statistics course, highlighting how teaching can also serve as scholarship that benefits other instructors.

Submitted: June 2, 2022

Faculty Josh Zender Business Josh Zender recently published a case study titled "Exploiting the Unemployment Insurance Program: A Role Play of the Actions of State Officials at the Height of the Coronavirus Pandemic" in Sage Publications.  This case positions the reader to consider the ethical pathways confronting budget planners of a state unemployment compensation system at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Submitted: May 6, 2022

Faculty Chris Aberson, Amber Gaffney, Humboldt Students Psychology Chris Aberson and Amber Gaffney served as co-chairs of the Western Psychological Association’s (WPA) 2022 Conference. The conference theme was Diversity, Equity, and Sustainability. At WPA, seven faculty and 37 students authored presentations. Chris Aberson gave the WPA Outstanding Teaching Award Address and Academic Research M.A. student Joseph Pang won the American Psychological Association Division for International Psychology’s student poster contest.

Submitted: May 2, 2022

Faculty Chris Aberson, Josue Rodriguez, Danielle Siegel Psychology Chris Aberson, along with Psychology Academic Research M.A. alums Josue Rodriguez (′19) and Danielle Siegel (′21) recently published an article titled Power Analysis for Regression Coefficients: The Role of Multiple Predictors and Power to Detect all Coefficients Simultaneously in The Quantitative Methods for Psychology. The work provides researchers tools to improve sample size planning for complex research designs. Both Mr. Rodriquez and Ms. Siegel are currently enrolled in U. C. Davis’ Quantitative Psychology Ph.D. program.

Submitted: April 15, 2022

Faculty Chris Aberson Psychology Chris Aberson recently published two papers as part of a multinational team including over 400 researchers. The first article, titled A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic appeared in Nature Human Behaviour (NHB). A second article, In COVID-19 health messaging, loss framing increases anxiety with little-to-no concomitant benefits: Experimental evidence from 84 countries, is in press at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). PNAS and NHB are highly influential outlets, boasting huge impact factors over 12.0. The team presently has an additional manuscript under review and another in preparation.

Submitted: April 6, 2022

Faculty Julie Slater-North and Michelle Rainer Social Work  

Julie Slater-North,  Lecturer/PPSC-SSW Program Coordinator along with colleague Michelle Rainer, Lecturer/Pathway/SERVE Project Coordinator and both from the Department of Social Work, recently published a chapter in the book, School Social Work: Engaging Social Justice and Racial Equity from Practitioners’ Perspectives The chapter, titled Rural Indigenous School Social Work as Best Practice School Social Work. This text is a collection of writings regarding serving diverse youth in California schools, written by both school-based practitioners and university-level educators.

Submitted: April 6, 2022

Faculty Meenal Rana Child Development Meenal Rana will be representing the department of Child Development on April 19th, 2022, as a keynote speaker for the 2022 Higher Colleges of Technology Education Student Research Virtual Conference in Abu Dhabi, UAE (Conference theme: "Educating the Whole Child in a Post-Pandemic World"). Rana presents her keynote on "Importance of Trauma-Informed Teaching in Post-Pandemic Classrooms".

Submitted: April 4, 2022

Faculty Chris Aberson Psychology Chris Aberson, Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department, recently joined the editorial advisory board of Meta-Psychology. Meta-Psychology is an open access outlet focused on meta science and quantitative methodology. Dr. Aberson is presently the editor-in-chief of Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy as well as an associate editor at Collabra Psychology. He also serves on the editorial boards of Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, and Basic and Applied Social Psychology.

Submitted: March 29, 2022

Faculty Amber Gaffney Psychology Dr. Amber Gaffney, Associate Professor of Psychology, along with colleague Michael Hogg from The Claremont Graduate University, recently published a chapter in the book The Psychology of Sociability (2022, Routledge). The chapter, titled A Social Identity Analysis of Sociability, focuses on how needs for affiliation with groups and examines both positive (e.g., better mental and physical health) and negative aspects (e.g., polarization, authoritarianism) of group identification and sociability.

Submitted: March 24, 2022

Faculty Humnath Panta Business Dr. Panta presented a paper entitled "Political Favoritism and Value of Corporate Cash Holdings " at the Southwestern Finance Association Annual conference held in New Orleans on March 3rd, 2022. This paper examines the impact of political favoritism on the value of corporate cash holdings and finds cash holding, on average, is less valuable for politically favored firms than their counterparts. In other words, this study shows that political favoritism is associated with a decrease of $0.44 in value for a $1.00 in cash holding. The authors define the stock ownership by the member of the US Congress as a measure of political favoritism to a firm.

Submitted: March 23, 2022

Faculty Chris Aberson Psychology

Chris Aberson, Professor and of the Chair Department of Psychology, recently published an R package called "BetterReg for Calculation of Useful Statistics for Linear and Logistic regression.” The package was accepted to the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), the primary repository for R packages. Previously Dr. Aberson published several versions of a package called pwr2ppl that provides numerous functions for statistical power analysis. pwr2ppl has been downloaded nearly 15,000 times since it’s initial publication in 2019 and is widely recognized as having one of the most clever R package names.

Submitted: February 23, 2022

Faculty Amber Gaffney and Academic Research M.A. Graduate Students Psychology

Cal Poly Humboldt Psychology faculty and numerous students presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Convention in San Francisco this last weekend. Lead presenters included Academic Research M.A. students Matthew Burt, Crane Cosno, Jacob Crocker, Jeff Frederick, Samantha Gardener, Jordan McDowell, and Joseph Pang. Amber Gaffney co-chaired the Group Processes and Intergroup Relations Pre-Conference. Chris Aberson also presented. Demonstrating the Psychology department’s commitment to hands-on learning, 12 graduate students and alum were authors on presentations. SPSP is the world’s largest organization of social and personality psychologists with over 7500 members.

Submitted: February 19, 2022

Faculty Sara L. Chase Merrick Child Development

Dr. Sara L. Chase Merrick, in collaboration with the Hoopa Tribal Education Association (HTEA), received a $49,000 grant from the Administration for Native Americans: Promote the Survival and Continuing Vitality of Native American Languages program. This grant will allow them to expand ongoing Hupa language immersion efforts. Dr. Merrick will be an Emerging Hupa Language Speaker-Teacher Fellow, which will enable her to further her language learning, speaking, and teaching work with expert speaker Verdena Parker and HTEA Hupa Language Teachers.

Submitted: February 17, 2022

Faculty Meenal Rana Child Development

In Feb 2022, Dr. Meenal Rana's research has received the spotlight in the" Researcher's Window" section of the Society for Study of Human Development (SSHD). Her work is shared on the link that follows:

https://sshdonline.org/february-2022-researchers-window-dr-meenal-rana/

Submitted: February 14, 2022