
The Psychological Science Department at Loyola Marymount University has been recognized for leading research addressing inequities and better supporting underserved and unserved populations in our diverse communities. Since April 2023, faculty and staff in the department have been awarded more than $8 million in grants and contracts for impactful research related to community psychology and mental health, understanding addiction, and how stigma contributes to cancer-related health disparities.
The prestigious grant awards are a testament to the transformative work being done at LMU and to the university’s commitment to the teacher-scholar model. “For this model to exist and be effective, you have to engage with your research, engage with your students, and find the synthesis between the two,” explained Adam Fingerhut, professor and chair of Psychological Science.
The Psychological Science faculty are researchers of the highest caliber and dedicated teachers. Cheryl Grills, President’s Professor of Psychological Science and director of PARC, the Psychology Applied Research Center, involves students in her Black psychology class with her innovative and progressive work on health disparities. Similarly, Tim Williamson, assistant professor of psychological science, is doing important research on lung cancer stigma while teaching a psychopathology course and involving students in his grant work.
“Our faculty are doing incredibly important research on factors that impact mental and physical health,” said Robbin D. Crabtree, dean, LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts. “These grants will have a significant impact on communities in California and throughout the country, on lung cancer patients, and on our students. In working closely with faculty who equally value and seamlessly integrate teaching, mentoring, and research, our students are actively contributing to research that drives change while honing strategic thinking and analytical skills for academic and career development.”
PARC and HeadsUP, a lab in the department that conducts rigorous research on adolescent and college-aged student health behaviors, routinely hire recent LMU graduates in psychology, ethnic studies, sociology, and more to work as full-time research assistants. Most of these students use their lab experience as a stepping-stone to M.A., Ph.D., and J.D. programs in psychology, law, social work, public health, public policy, and medicine.
“It is heartwarming for me to run into them in the field,” said Grills. “They are shining beacons of the Jesuit and Marymount traditions and the LMU mission: true persons for others. What more could I ask of my career?”
Learn more about the faculty and their grants:
Cheryl Grills, President’s Professor of Psychological Science
Sandra Villanueva, associate director
PARC
PARC is committed to conducting participatory, culturally relevant, intersectional, collaborative, and flexible research, which leads to organizational, systems/policy, individual, and societal-level change. PARC’s recent grant awards include $3,568,841 from the California Department of Public Health for a four-year project titled “Phase 2 Extension California Reducing Disparities Project (CRDP) Evaluation”; $730,000 from the California Community Foundation for a two-year project titled “Evaluation of the Trauma Prevention Partnerships”; and $500,000 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a one-year project titled “Evaluation of the People, Parks, and Power (P3) Initiative.”
The CRDP is a first-of-its-kind prevention and early intervention effort to reduce mental health disparities in unserved, underserved, and inappropriately served communities throughout the state. CRDP Phase 2 upended business as usual by employing Community Defined Evidence Projects (CDEP), which focus on interventions that embrace knowledge and practices developed by and for the local community. Building upon Phase 2, the extension evaluation plan focuses on modifying research design, methods, and analysis to ensure alignment with Phase 2 extension efforts to cultivate systems change, sustainability, and scalability (scaling up and out).
The Trauma Prevention Partnership is a public-private collaboration between the L.A. County Department of Public Health’s Office of Violence Prevention and the California Community Foundation, funded by the American Rescue Plan Act. Its goal is to prevent violent incidents, implement crisis response when violent incidents occur, address factors contributing to gun and gang violence, increase access to trauma-informed care and healing-centered services and supports, and invest in upstream youth programs, youth engagement, and youth leadership opportunities across L.A. County. This project consists of 25-30 community-based organizations, and, among other things, PARC will create user-friendly and culturally relevant data collection tools and an online survey to aid these funded organizations in tracking populations served, activities, success stories, and challenges.
Funded by the federal government, the People, Parks, and Power (P3) Initiative is a partnership between the L.A. County Office of Violence Prevention and the California Community Foundation. The initiative proposes to advance park and green space equity in some of the socioeconomically hardest hit Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities in the U.S. by supporting community organizing, power building, and community advocacy for park and green space equity. P3 focuses on transforming the policies, institutional practices, power dynamics, and problematic narratives that produced large-scale inequities impacting entire communities.
“These initiatives and PARC’s research role provide concrete examples of the power of community to catalyze, create, and sustain conditions for healthy communities where the community is ‘at the table’ rather than the common reality of ‘being on the menu’ of government policies, academic research and theories, models and practices,” said Grills.
Joe LaBrie, professor of psychological science
Sarah C. Boyle, senior research scientist
HeadsUp Lab
LaBrie received two grants from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA): a $620, 519 grant for his team’s three-year R34 project titled “2 College Truths & 1 Lie: Social Media Embedded Gamified Normative Re-education” and a $2,553, 319 grant for an RO1 project titled “Feasibility and Effectiveness of Gamified Digital Intervention to Prevent Alcohol and Mental Health Risks among Sexual Minority Women.”

The grant for the social media project will support research on whether an advocacy campaign to reduce high-risk college drinking is more effectively delivered through paid advertisements or interactive games on social media platforms popular with college students versus more traditional print posters on campus. Drawing on the labs’ previous successes using gamification as an approach to alcohol intervention, this game, “2 College Truths & 1 Lie,” will invite students to compete for prizes by identifying untrue normative statements about the behaviors and attitudes of LMU students related to the use of alcohol and other substances. According to LaBrie, “this interactive, gamified, social media-embedded approach to social norms marketing is designed to better meet students where they are (a longstanding Ignatian practice), capture their attention, and provide a fun, motivational, and non-threatening context for learning the risk-reducing campus drinking norms that have traditionally been displayed in a dry and boring manner.” Additionally, two recent alums, Layla Rainosek ’24 and Oliver Hatch ’24, have joined the team as full-time research associates to help manage the project while gaining experience that will bolster their applications to competitive doctoral programs in psychology.
The grant to study gamified digital intervention is an extension of the research that HeadsUp Senior Research Scientist Sarah Boyle did as part of her dissertation while at Claremont Graduate University. It will build on a previous grant collaboration with LaBrie, which introduced a highly engaging web app that was successful in reducing alcohol consumption and subsequent negative consequences among lesbian, bisexual, and queer-identified women, a population at high risk of engaging in heavy drinking with a growing need for targeted alcohol interventions. Boyle, who identifies as a lesbian and leveraged her knowledge of the community and culture to design and program the initial web app, will serve as the principal investigator for the first time on this project. “As the low-budget pilot app was able to engage over 2,600 sexual minority women and over 90% of users providing feedback reported that the app benefitted their psychological well-being, I can’t wait to see the benefits we can provide with a more sophisticated app, additional features that users wanted, expanded research team, and much larger budget for marketing and promotion.” The new version of the app will also offer users sexual minority-specific psychoeducation on topics such as risky drinking and alcohol treatment resources, physical health, psychological well-being, and minority stress, among others. Psychological Sciences Department Chair Adam Fingerhut will also serve as a co-investigator on this project, lending his expertise in health-related stereotype threat, stigma, and LGBTQ health to benefit the app’s resource library. The project will also provide an opportunity for undergraduate students to gain hands-on experience in LGBTQ health research, app design, and marketing. Students interested in serving as part-time research assistants are encouraged to contact the HeadsUp lab.
Timothy Williamson, assistant professor of psychological science
PRRISM Lab
Williamson received a two-year research supplement to promote diversity in health-related research from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The $56,760 grant will support Williamson and Alexandra Sturm, assistant professor of psychological science, in co-mentoring McKenzie Reese ’25, a psychological science major and honors student, who will carve out a research project within the scope of Williamson’s ongoing NCI-funded project titled “Adapting and Testing a Novel Self-Compassion Intervention to Reduce Lung Cancer Stigma.”

“Immersing myself in the research opportunities provided at LMU, such as SURP (Summer Undergraduate Research Program), research assistantship with Professor Sturm, McNair, and the Honors Program, etc., allowed me to feel prepared when deciding to apply to work with Professor Williamson on the diversity supplement,” said Reese. “This opportunity has ignited my commitment to reshaping healthcare equitably and promoting inclusivity in health-related research.”
Specifically, Reese will focus on understanding and promoting successful recruitment, engagement, and retention of African-American lung cancer patients in Williamson’s parent study. “African American cancer patients are less likely than white patients to enroll in clinical trials, so the existing evidence from this research does not properly represent the diversity of patients diagnosed with this devastating disease,” said Williamson.
As part of the grant, Reese will receive hands-on psycho-oncology research training, including conducting highly sensitive interviews with lung cancer patients directly and the opportunity to travel to and attend professional scientific conferences. Williamson and Reese hope to address cancer-related health disparities by breaking down barriers to clinical trial participation and ensuring that participant samples in cancer research are fully representative.