Dissertation Research Awards

The Center for Integrative Developmental Science Dissertation Research Award assists doctoral students with research costs. Awards of up to $2,500 are available.

Applicants must be enrolled full-time in a doctoral program at one of the Cornell graduate schools and actively working on their dissertation. Dissertation proposals must have been approved by the applicant’s dissertation committee, and the dissertation research must be in the field of developmental science or another closely related field.

Now accepting applications for 2023! Please submit all materials by December 17th, and email cids@cornell.edu with any questions.

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2022 Dissertation Research Award Recipients

The Center for Integrative Developmental Science is pleased to announce the two inaugural recipients of the Dissertation Research Award for the 2022-2023 academic year. The Dissertation Research Award Program was established to assist full-time Cornell doctoral students who are conducting dissertation research in the field of developmental science or another closely related field with research related costs. Through this program, the Center seeks to involve students in its work to build a rigorous science of health and well-being in diverse developmental contexts, and to translate science into practice and policy.

Julia Nolte is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology. Her dissertation research will focus on the roles that objective cognitive capacity, subjectively perceived decision difficulty, and affect play in determining age-related differences in intentional decision avoidance. Her research will attempt to decrease older adults' reliance on decision avoidance by adapting an intervention already proven to encourage active engagement with the decision process.

James D. Rounds is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology. His dissertation research seeks to explore the role of instructor-student interactions in affecting students’ levels of motivation and readiness to learn. His project will focus on developing immersive virtual environment (IVE) tasks that can help assess explicit and implicit cognitive, metacognitive, and neural processes associated with a student’s “readiness to learn.”