From left: Paul Piff, Anais Geronimo Jimenez and Rudy Medina Ceballos
Grant funds new research that flips the script on working-class student success
The Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at The City College of New York recently announced its 2026-27 cohort of Social Mobility Lab research grantees. Among the select recipients is an ambitious team from UC Irvine’s Department of Psychology: Associate Professor Paul Piff, doctoral candidate Rudy Medina Ceballos and first-year Ph.D. student Anais Geronimo Jimenez.
Their upcoming study will investigate a powerful, often overlooked asset: familial interdependence. Rather than viewing deep family ties and cultural obligations as obstacles or burdens that pull students away from their studies, this research explores how "familism" serves as a profound source of resilience, motivation, and academic tenacity.
Piff says Geronimo Jimenez will focus on a second cultural asset: “social attention,” or the shared, learned way a community observes, values and distributes cognitive focus. Social attention “determines what details, individuals, and relationships a society prioritizes,” according to the National Institutes of Health. “Depending on the culture, this can manifest as holistic, community-wide observation or narrow, individualistic focus.”
The goal of the research project is to prove that students from working-class backgrounds don’t need to abandon their core identities or distance themselves from their communities to achieve upward mobility.
For the doctoral students spearheading the project, the mission isn't just academic—it’s deeply personal. Both Medina Ceballos and Geronimo Jimenez are first-generation scholars drawing directly on their lived experiences to shape the study’s hypothesis, design, and execution.
“Receiving this grant is especially meaningful to me because this work closely connects to both my academic and personal backgrounds,” says Medina Ceballos. “As a first-generation, Mexican-heritage scholar, I know how important family, support systems, and institutional opportunities can be in helping students continue pursuing their goals. This grant gives us the opportunity to better understand the strengths and resources that students draw on as they navigate higher education, especially students from working-class and minoritized backgrounds.”
With a core research background focusing on perceived social support and subjective social mobility, Medina Ceballos is driving the project’s data collection and structural design. Alongside Piff and Geronimo Jimenez, he aims to illuminate the cultural frameworks that help students visualize a successful future.
“I am excited to help develop a project that examines how sources of support, resilience, and motivation may shape students’ academic experiences and future mobility beliefs,” Medina Ceballos notes. “I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to research that can highlight these experiences and potentially inform the development of more supportive educational environments.”
Collaborator Geronimo Jimenez shares this vision, viewing the Social Mobility Lab grant as a vital tool to shift how higher education institutions support vulnerable student populations. Her role focuses heavily on study formulation and translating data into actionable insights.
“The Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership Grant gives my team and me the wonderful opportunity to investigate the different sources of psychological resilience that can serve as a resource for working-class students to navigate higher education successfully,” Geronimo Jimenez says. “As a first-generation student, I am acutely aware of the obstacles and inequities that often discourage students who come from a working-class background from pursuing our dreams and reaching our full potential.”
By identifying the exact sociopsychological and cultural factors that foster tenacity, the UC Irvine team hopes their findings will stretch far beyond the laboratory, ultimately reshaping institutional structures and educational policy.
“I am excited to venture into this new research and professional development with my team,” Geronimo Jimenez adds, “which will generate impactful findings that can influence interventions and policy changes.”
— Matt Coker