Daniel del Cid has been named the recipient of the James Hong Memorial Fellowship for 2021-22. The James Hong Memorial Fellowship was established to honor James’s life and to memorialize his lasting contributions to the UC Santa Barbara community. The fellowship supports research in at-risk youth and school violence with the goal of helping to prevent violence and promote safety, as requested by James’s family.
del Cid is a School Psychology graduate student researcher under the supervision of Dr. Jill Sharkey. He has worked on a grant awarded as part of UCSB’s Multidisciplinary Research on COVID-19 & Its Impacts (MRCI) to study the impacts of COVID-19 on the mental health and parental practices of essential workers. Daniel's research explores educational policies and practices that can enhance and support the experiences of Latinx subgroups (e.g., first-generation immigrants, undocumented, documented, AB540 students, LGBTQ). Daniel hopes to use this research to elucidate potential stress buffers among these vulnerable, underserved, at-risk populations, and more specifically, develop interventions that might lessen possible negative mental health and academic outcomes. After completing his doctorate, del Cid hopes to continue serving underserved and underrepresented students at a California university as a tenured professor.