Taylor Berrier, Brooke Bullard and Rachel Hantman are 2024 recipients of the National Institutes of Health F31 Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Awards. As Ph.D. students in communication sciences & disorders, biomedical sciences and clinical-community psychology, respectively, the awardees will receive mentorship and funding for the remainder of their doctoral programs.
Why it matters
The National Institutes of Health F31 Awards grant a $28,224 yearly stipend and can cover 60 percent of tuition costs for up to five years. These fellowships support doctoral students conducting biomedical, behavioral and clinical research by providing funding, training and mentorship. As NIH F31 fellows, recipients conduct cutting-edge medical research projects that have broad impacts in the healthcare field.
Who they are
Taylor Berrier researches in associate professor Suzanne Adlof’s lab at the Arnold School of Public Health. The NIH F31 fellowship will allow her to research the emotion regulation of children with developmental language disorder, comparing the results to those from children with typical development. Her project will study the differences between children’s self-report, behavior and heart rate variability during both a linguistically challenging and a domain-general task. After completing her Ph.D. program, Berrier hopes to be a professor. She plans to study risk and resilience factors for mental health problems in children with language and literacy disorders and train the next generation of speech-language pathologists.
Brooke Bullard is currently researching in professor Angela Murphy’s lab at the USC School of Medicine Columbia. With funding from the NIH, she will research the health benefits of dietary panaxynol, a compound found in American ginseng, on gut resilience in murine models of Ulcerative colitis. This project will study panaxynol-associated changes to immune, microbial, and metabolite profiles, and Bullard aims to develop this compound into a safe and effective treatment for colitis. She aspires to be a professor so that she can help future students pursue their academic goals.
Rachel Hantman conducts research with professor Jane Roberts at USC’s Neurodevelopmental Disorders Lab. As an NIH F31 fellow, she will research infants with fragile X syndrome and those with neurotypical development. She will focus on how mothers’ and children’s respiratory sinus arrhythmia are synchronized, paying special attention to how certain factors such as stress and family relationship quality affect this function. After her doctoral studies, Hantman wants to continue researching biobehavioral interactions and the impact of context in neurodevelopmental disorders. She also plans to work as a clinician, assessing for neurodevelopmental disorders.
In addition to receiving support from national fellowships advisors, applicants can also gain insight from a faculty committee. Members of the 2023 – 2024 NIH committee were David Mott, Fabienne Poulaine, Ronald Prinz and Jeff Twiss.
Students interested in learning more about applying for National Institutes of Health grants should contact USC’s national fellowships team.