Jenna Riis, left, and J. Zoe Klemfuss are 2020-21 Hellman Fellows.
Assistant professors in psychological science awarded grants to support research, scholarly work
J. Zoe Klemfuss and Jenna Riis, assistant professors of psychological science, have received 2020-21 Hellman Fellowships. They join an elite group of 63 UCI Hellman Fellows since 2013, when the campus program was established with a gift of $1.25 million from the Hellman Family Foundation.
Klemfuss and Riis each will receive $50,000.
J. Zoe Klemfuss
As a Hellman fellow, Klemfuss will identify effective techniques for building rapport with suspected child maltreatment victims to encourage disclosure and elicit complete and accurate reports.
In maltreatment cases, Klemfuss notes, a child’s report is often the most important piece of evidence.
“Typically, there are no other witnesses, and many forms of maltreatment leave no, or transient, physical evidence, which is unavailable by the time children make their initial disclosures,” she says. “As such, identifying methods that can enhance the likelihood that child victims will disclose maltreatment, and that they will provide an accurate and complete report, is of critical importance to providing needed services, attaining justice, and protecting children from potentially dire physical and psychological health consequences that may result if they are returned to environments in which they may continue to be maltreated. Rapport is one method that may facilitate children’s reporting in a variety of contexts, and it is unique in that it also allows adults to sensitively attend to children’s emotional needs during the course of the interview. As such, it is a particularly promising method for use in child maltreatment contexts.”
Jenna Riis
Riis will identify and validate biologic and self-report measures of oral health that could be used by researchers and clinicians to address oral, physical and emotional health disparities and improve the integration and quality of healthcare.
Improvements in the integration of oral and physical healthcare is the overarching and long term goal for Riis’ research.
“Patterns of oral health disparities in the U.S. mirror those of other health inequities in systemic conditions, such as diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease,” she notes. “These overlapping distributions may reflect common pathways underlying disease etiologies. This study aims to identify and validate salivary biomeasure and self-report assessments of oral health and examine associations between these new oral health measures and aspects of physical and emotional health in a diverse and high-risk sample. The overall goal of this work is to develop new tools that could be used to study common biologic mechanisms connecting health disparities across multiple domains and promote the integration of health-related research and care across oral, physical, and emotional health.”
Hellman History
Chris and Warren Hellman began providing early-career funding to junior faculty at UC campuses and four private institutions in 1994. Since then, more than 1,900 individuals have been recipients. The grants may be used for such research purposes as equipment, travel, photography and graduate assistants.
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