Psychology Honors Thesis Students - Mortensen Research Awards

Congratulations to the Spring 2022 Undergraduate Mortensen Travel and Research Award Winners: Cassie Davis and Emma Estrella! This award is a $500 scholarship recognizing students completing an honors thesis or major project that involves research-related expenses. Both recipients have been supervised by Dr. Pat Frazier. 

Cassie is an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Pat Frazier's Stress and Trauma Lab. This year, for her senior honors thesis, she is working with Dr. Frazier and Kayla Huber, a PhD candidate in the lab, to conduct research on the harassment of runners in public spaces. She hopes to raise awareness of this understudied issue by conducting survey research on runners across the United States to better understand their experiences of harassment while running in public, and the impact these experiences have. As an avid runner Cassie is extremely passionate about this work!

The Mortensen Research Scholarship is critically supporting this work by allowing for incentivization for participation in the form of charitable donations to running non-profits. In order to encourage runners to participate, Cassie will donate $1 for every person who completes the survey, up to 500 people, to a non-profit running organization of their choice (either Girls on the Run; Athlete Ally; Black Girls Run; or Team Red, White & Blue). This research is by runners, for runners, to benefit runners!

Emma is conducting her honors thesis in the Stress and Trauma lab directed by Dr. Pat Frazier. Her thesis focuses on the healthcare experiences of individuals with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and hypermobility spectrum disorder, connective tissue disorders that often present with invisible and misunderstood symptoms. The purpose of this research is to understand how these individuals experience the healthcare system, and how their experience is related to health-related quality of life and symptom management.   

This award allows Emma to provide incentives to recruit participants for the study. Because of the clinical population, she hopes that making a donation to a relevant organization will encourage individuals to participate and further future research.