The PhD Program is proud to announce the recipients of the Jeongseok Kong and Sunmi Jin Memorial Endowment and the Dr. Donna Harrington Memorial Fellowship for the 2020-2021 Academic Year.
Sol Baik is the second Jeongseok Kong and Sunmi Jin PhD Fellow. Sol\'s research interests center on understanding how family and unpaid caregivers of older adults with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) balance their life in the joint influences of gender, race-ethnicity, and social class. More specifically, she is interested in exploring life balance among caregivers through analyzing time use over time and space and how it influences their health and well-being. She is also interested in reducing social isolation among ADRD caregivers with environmental resources around them.
As the second recipient of the Dr. Donna Harrington PhD Fellowship, Lauren Pryce McCarthy is a fourth year doctoral student. She received her MSW from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice. Following her MSW program, she worked for seven years providing in-home structural family therapy in her favorite city, Philadelphia. Lauren currently works as a Graduate Research Assistant for Dr. Bethany Lee researching service implementation in the child welfare system. Lauren’s dissertation research is on exploring pathways to residential care for child welfare involved youth. This research will involve examining child welfare placement trajectories as a path dependent process using advanced statistical methods and giving voice to caregivers’ experiences of the child welfare and mental health service systems during a child’s journey to residential care.
Jeongseok Kong was a PhD student at UMSSW who passed away in a car accident with his wife, Sunmi Jin, in 2014, before he could finish the doctoral program. Dr. Donna Harrington was the Associate Dean for Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Education; she passed away in 2018. The Kong-Jin & Harrington fellowships were started by friends, family, peers, and UMB faculty to honor Jeongseok, Sunmi, and Donna’s legacies at UMB while continuing to promote advances in social work research and practice. Congratulations, Sol and Lauren!