Applied Health Scholars Mentor Database

Researcher:	School	Research Focus:	Potential Projects
Greer, Tammy PhD	Psychology	Health Psychology	"Indigenous peoples have long understood that the development of community-sustaining character virtues and behaviors is crucial for survivability, both of the community and the individual. During adolescence, when the focus is differentiation and individuation, Indigenous stories offered morality and trickster tales to remind youth of their most fundamental instruction - to build relationship with human beings and the natural world. This is especially important during adolescents because risky behaviors are at their peak during this time and life-long habits are forming. We know that there is an inverse relationship between character virtues and negative risky behaviors. What we don’t know is whether self-regulation is a moderator of that relationship and whether health behaviors that predict obesity and other health-related outcomes are predicted by these variables. We will survey students, analyze secondary data sources, and collect data online to test these relationships."
Huebert, Andrew PhD	Psychology	My research is focused on memory and cognition, more specifically recognition memory, metacognition. These areas also overlap with concepts like music recognition, word recognition, false memory, tip of the tongue, and déjà vu	We currently have projects related to music recognition and musical feature significance. Aging and false memory, memory and curiosity.
Galloway, Riley PhD	Exercise Science
Young, Sharon, PhD	Anthropology	I use a biocultural and evolutionary approach to address questions in medical anthropology, human reproductive behavior, and maternal health/nutrition.	Investigating the relationship between food security and maternal health in Hattiesburg and I plan to expand on this work to compare experiences in rural an urban areas using quesitonnaires and finger-stick blood samples to measure lipids and glucose. Another possible project would investigate the effects of different placenta preparations on salivary hormones in postpartum moms. This would entail administration of a questionnaire and the collection of saliva samples before and after supplementation with placenta capsules that have been prepared in different ways. It is more likely that we will work on a version of the first project, though.
Lemacks, Jennifer PhD	Health Professions	Dr. Lemacks serves as the director of Gulf South Center for Community-Engaged Health Research and Innovation whose mission is to support transdisciplinary team science, multi-stakeholder partnerships and workforce capacity, to conduct community-engaged and solutions-oriented disease prevention and healthy aging research, and to address health disparities. Research activities within the center primarily focus on cardiometabolic health, social determinants of health, health disparities, and community priorities and needs.	On-site data collection opportunity for an ongoing project, planning and executing community outreach activities focusing on health, secondary data analysis for completed research projects.
Hajnal, Alen PhD	Psychology	cognitive psychology, with a special focus on visual and haptic perception, sensorimotor coordination, object perception	We have several projects ongoing. One project involves perception of affordances in virtual reality settings. I would need a student with good quantitative and computing skills, preferably from a computer science and psychology background. Another project involves perception of, recognition of, and interaction with objects. We compare visual and haptic perception of objects. We use 3D scanners, and 3D printers to create objects for testing. I need one student who is versed in experimental design and has basic statistical knowledge. The third project involves analysis of large existing datasets of word associations using machine learning methods. This also requires the student to have some level of computational skills.