Alum Suzanne Perkins 85F Awarded Grant to Research Child Trauma and Maltreatment
The rarely bestowed grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development will allow her to complete work she put on hold due to a cancer diagnosis.
Hampshire College alum and parent Suzanne Perkins 85F P18 is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Michigan's (U-M) College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and an affiliated member of its Institute for Social Research.
She began research as a postdoctoral fellow seven years ago with a different fellowship from U-M, but had to put it on hold to deal with health issues. “I had been examining cognitive processing in childhood post traumatic stress disorder, which is mostly from abuse and neglect in children. The grant will allow me to publish those data, to update my neuroscience skills and to learn about child maltreatment from an interdisciplinary research perspective,” Perkins says.
Perkins is one of only a handful to receive an award like this, which comes from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development through a parent grant at the Washington University in St. Louis Center for Innovation in Child Maltreatment Policy, Research and Training, a fact she says is evidence of her persistence.
“I’m pretty proud that I was tenacious enough to keep at it,” she says. “I did my undergraduate work at Hampshire College and they taught me to work on problems and find a way to persevere.”
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