Sophia Eisenberg Garcia.
Sophia Eisenberg Garcia, a fourth-year doctoral student at the Boston College School of Social Work, has received a two-year, $68,000 fellowship from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to examine the relationships among exposure to community violence, parenting, and executive functioning in young children.
The fellowship, known as an F31, is formally called the Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award and supports doctoral students as they conduct mentored research and receive specialized training.
Eisenberg Garcia is one of only a handful of scholars at social work schools to hold an F31 award. She joins recent BCSSW graduates J.C. Hodges, PhD’24, and Natalie Grafft, PhD’25, as recipients of the prestigious fellowship.
“I’m very grateful and humbled to have received it,” said Eisenberg Garcia.
Through the fellowship, Eisenberg Garcia will conduct three studies examining how exposure to community violence in early childhood affects executive functioning in later childhood and adolescence, whether family-level factors such as parenting can buffer those effects, and how parenting behaviors may vary among families with different levels of exposure to community violence.
Her interest in this topic took shape while she was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, when she taught in prisons and began exploring ways to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. It deepened when she became a high school teacher at a charter school in Chicago, where she saw how exposure to gun violence affected the development and functioning of her students.
“Even though I worked with high school students, I became even more interested in early childhood because it is such a massive determinant of later-life functioning,” said Eisenberg Garcia, who also received BCSSW’s 2024 Carolyn B. Thomas Fellowship, which is awarded every year to a doctoral student whose scholarship focuses on children and families.
“ This grant would not exist without that course. I learned all of the different elements that are needed in a grant proposal, but the strategy was probably the biggest piece. It taught me to balance what my priorities were, what the National Institutes of Health’s priorities were, and what data I had access to. ”
The F31 fellowship will enable Eisenberg Garcia to expand her training under a multidisciplinary team of mentors from BC and other institutions. Her team includes BC Professors Catherine Taylor, Summer Sherburne Hawkins, and Rebecca Levine Coley; BC Senior Research Statistician Melissa McTernan; Julia Fleckman, an associate professor at the Washington University in St. Louis Bursky School of Public Health; and Stacy Drury, psychiatrist-in-chief at Boston Children’s Hospital.
She will also take courses in neuroscience and receive funding to attend conferences.
Eisenberg Garcia said she would not have received the award had she not taken a doctoral-level course called Research Grant Writing for the Health and Behavioral Sciences. The course was taught by Kirsten Davison, the associate dean for research at BCSSW, who helped her throughout the application process, from conceptualizing her proposal to fine-tuning drafts and submissions.
“This grant would not exist without that course,” said Eisenberg Garcia. “I learned all of the different elements that are needed in a grant proposal, but the strategy was probably the biggest piece. It taught me to balance what my priorities were, what the NIH’s priorities were, and what data I had access to.”
She hopes to use her fellowship as a launching pad for the next stage of her career. Her long-term professional goal is to become a tenure-track professor, designing interventions aimed at preventing exposure to community violence and improving outcomes for young people who experience it.
“This study does not involve me conducting an intervention,” she said, “but I hope the F31 puts me on the path toward securing additional federal funding to create and test interventions.”