The Educational Psychology department is proud to recognize Priscilla Tovar-Perez, a current PhD student in the Human Development area, as the recipient of the 2024 Michael Vincent O’Shea and Harriet Frisbie Eastabrooks O’Shea Fellowship. The O’Shea Fellowship is awarded to an Educational Psychology student who shows promise in adolescent or educational psychology, the education of children or adolescents, or the psychotherapy or guidance of children or adolescents.
Priscilla’s work focuses on adolescents and social media. Reflecting on this award, Priscilla writes:
I study adolescent well-being, specifically how adolescents cope with times of social change and stressful situations in and out of school. As a scholar, I am also interested in the ways adolescents use social media as a tool to cope with feelings of stress and build relationships with their peers.
I am honored to be this year’s recipient of the O’Shea Fellowship and I am thankful to have the opportunity to dedicate myself to my research and dissertation. My dissertation will examine the relationship between social media use and body image by investigating how online and offline representations of ideal beauty standards impacts adolescent girls’ level of body dissatisfaction and well-being and how peer relationships and ethnic identification can serve as protective factors. Body image research is a growing area of research; however, an overwhelming amount of body image research has based its conclusions on WEIRD samples, thus another area of interest is to consider how differing cultural values about body shape among ethnically diverse teens impacts their level of body dissatisfaction and overall well-being.
As previously mentioned, this fellowship will allow me to dedicate my time to my research and it will provide me the time to focus on applying to various academic positions in the U.S. My long-term goal is to become a professor and pursue my never-ending questions about adolescent development and utilize those findings to serve my community. I am immensely grateful to my mentors for their unwavering support and commitment to excellence.
Congrats to Priscilla on this accomplishment!