March 23, 2026
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have been awarded $125,766 to investigate how Black and Latine children build academic resilience. Daphne Henry, LRDC Research Scientist, Lab Director and Principal Investigator of the Understanding Development Diverse Contexts Lab (UDDC), and Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, and Andrea Medrano, UDDC Lab Collaborator and Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, received this award from the Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood to support their community-engaged and intersectional research.
This funding will support their study, "SPARK Study: Studying Pathways to Academic Resilience in Black and Latine Kids: A Mixed Methods Approach." This study will illuminate how culturally grounded parenting practices and community factors foster academic resilience among prekindergarten children, helping to identify strengths that support early educational success.
The UDDC aims to understand the sociocultural and contextual factors and processes that influence learning, behavior, and health of racially diverse, ethnically diverse, and socioeconomically diverse youth. They specifically focus on community-engaged and equity-centered research, using intersectional frameworks to best understand how overlapping identities interact with social systems to shape child and adolescent development.
The Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood, founded in 2014, is a foundation that aims to support research and development projects to improve the welfare of young children in the United States.
Written by Amber Eschrich