OSU Ph.D. student awarded $60,000 Doris Duke Fellowship
Monday, April 11, 2016
Jennifer Daer Shields, an Oklahoma State third-year clinical psychology Ph.D. student, was recently awarded a $60,000 Doris Duke Fellowship for the Promotion of Child Well-Being from Chapin Hall, a research and policy center, at the University of Chicago. The award is designed to find and develop a new generation of leaders dedicated to and capable of creating practice and policy innovations that will enhance child development and improve the nation’s ability to prevent child abuse and neglect.
“I am thrilled to represent OSU as the first Doris Duke fellow from the state of Oklahoma and I can’t wait to learn from some of the most well respected scholars in our field,” Shields said.
Shields started the clinical psychology doctorate program at OSU in the fall of 2013. After graduating from the University of Tulsa in May of 2013 with a B.S. in psychology and a B.A. in music, Shields began to look at graduate schools. Learning that OSU has strong connections with the Center for Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC), which houses some of the top researchers in the field, solidified her choice to enter OSU’s program.
“Knowing that I could get strong collaborative training from both OSU and OUHSC just down the street from where I grew up was enough to convince me,” Shields said.
The focus of Shield’s research is to evaluate and strengthen child abuse prevention programs. Her dissertation is designed to look at factors that influence service engagement and attrition in treatment programs for youth with problematic sexual behavior.
“I always knew I wanted to work in the field of child abuse and neglect prevention, but I fell into the world of studying problematic sexual behavior by total accident,” Shields said. “Once I started providing clinical services to these youth and realized what potential we have for making meaningful change, I was hooked!”
Shields received her master’s in clinical psychology from OSU in the spring of 2015. She immediately started applying for the Doris Duke Fellowship that summer. The fellowship application required Shields to identify an academic mentor, Jane Silovsky, Ph.D., from OUHSC, and policy mentor, Elizabeth Ralston, Ph.D., Medical University of South Carolina, who could help her maximize the impact of her research in terms of policy and practice reform in addition to constructing a proposal.
“The application process was fairly extensive, which meant that I spent every Saturday of the fall semester at Panera writing my proposal,” she said.
Shields submitted her proposal in December and found out she received an interview with members of the selection committee. Two weeks later, she learned she received the award.
“I was shocked!,” Shields said “This award is something that I’ve talked about with my advisers since my first year of graduate study, so to see all of my hard work come to fruition was extremely rewarding.”
Shields says her favorite part of the fellowship is that she now has access to a group of collaborative interdisciplinary researchers, which has opened her mind to think about her own research in new and innovative ways. She looks forward to continuing her research at OSU until she graduates in spring of 2019 following completion of the Doris Duke Fellowship and a pre-doctoral internship.
“OSU’s clinical psychology program is full of incredibly bright, hardworking people,” Shields said. “The individuals I work with constantly inspire me to do more and be more.”
Story by Taylor Young
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