Two School Psychology PhD students, Lauren Knuckey and Sahian Cruz, were each awarded a 2025 Thomas R. Kratochwill Dissertation Award to Advance Prevention and Intervention Sciences.
Lauren writes, “I am grateful to have received the Thomas R. Kratochwill Dissertation Award for Summer 2025. My dissertation focused on creating a family-school-community collaboration framework that was based in liberation psychology. To do this, I worked with families and school professionals in the local area to identify current struggles in family-school-community collaboration and modify framework elements to be responsive to community needs and current programming. It is very meaningful to have the opportunity to contribute to the body of prevention and intervention research and have my work recognized!
Currently, I am completing my psychology predoctoral internship at Allina Health and Addiction Services in Minneapolis, MN. Presently, I am working at an adolescent psychiatric inpatient unit and a hospital-based outpatient clinic providing intervention, assessment, and consultation services to children, adolescents, and their families. I have thoroughly enjoyed my internship experience and am looking forward to continuing my training as a postdoctoral fellow at the Waisman Center in Fall 2025. Here I will be providing services to children with developmental differences and their families.”
Sahian writes, “I am honored to receive the Kratochwill Dissertation Award to Advance Prevention and Intervention Science. For my dissertation project, “Algo Que No Puedes Medir”: Schoolwide Family Engagement from the Perspectives of Latine Caregivers, I used a convergent mixed-methods design to understand the contextual fit of family-school collaboration practices for Latine families in one metropolitan area of the Midwest. I also utilized a community-engaged research approach for my dissertation study for the purpose of centering the values, priorities, and perspectives of my participants. A primary aim of my research was to understand which existing family engagement practices are helpful for Latine caregivers, which practices are unhelpful, and how Latine caregivers would change these practices. Based on the findings of this research, I offer recommendations for improving the contextual fit of the family-school collaboration research for use in culturally and linguistically diverse school communities, thus offering a promising path to advancing family-school collaboration as an evidence-based practice. I am thankful to receive this award and look forward to continuing to support culturally and linguistically diverse school communities through practice and research.”
Congrats Lauren and Sahian!