Featured image: Fellows Maria Lima (left) and Nick Zambrotta (right)
It has been a busy two months for our third cohort of Fellows: from participating in training sessions on research replicability, data visualization, and time management to lively discussion sessions among Fellows, guest speakers, and staff. We caught up with two of our Fellows to ask about their experience thus far. Read on to learn about their research and what they hope to achieve over the next year.
Maria do Carmo Correia de Lima
Maria says that her “awakening to a ‘gerontological’ perspective” began at 15 when she saw her maternal grandmother evolve to immobility syndrome after suffering three strokes. She began to think about questions such as, “How to deal with finitude? How to promote a less suffering death? And how to lighten the burdens on caregivers?”. But her dive into gerontology as a field began when she led a research project on body awareness in older women while studying physiotherapy.
Maria is now a postdoctoral trainee at the Lab BioNR in the Department of Health of the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC). She has been researching the implementation of a gerontological functional assessment and falls prevention intervention. Maria is particularly passionate about the development of life-space mobility in older adults—using interdisciplinary partnerships to investigate solutions to maintain and expand mobility within family, neighborhood, and city contexts.
This focus on interdisciplinarity and cross-collaboration drew Maria to CAnD3’s training program. “I want to improve myself as a professional, exchange knowledge, ask questions, develop new skills, and seek new opportunities. I also want to work beyond assistance… and [academia] for my work to impact other organizations. As a CAnD3 Fellow, I want to collaborate with the team and open new doors for my work… [to contribute to] life trajectories in favor of active and healthy aging.”
Maria likes to explore cities by walking or cycling. You can find her in libraries, coffee shops, parks, or having a picnic with family and friends. Some of her other ways to celebrate life are playing Dixit, listening to music, and reading works by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
“This semester was productive,” Maria mentions, having started her postdoctoral internship and CAnD3 fellowship simultaneously while publishing the results of her doctoral and postdoctoral work. She recently published a paper on older adults’ perception of sidewalk walkability in Brazil. “A city that is good for children, older adults, and other vulnerable people is good for everyone.”
You can learn more about Maria and connect with her here.
Nick Zambrotta
In March 2022, Nick presented his research at the Eastern Psychological Association on the role of sanctity and purity when making moral judgments. The results showed that these sanctity principles are actually a proxy for prejudice. “This relationship, which is a characteristic of conservative moral values, is mediated through behavior attribution, indicating that simple explanations for others’ behaviors (like “that person is a mean person, not someone who is having a bad day!”) are associated with prejudicial moral judgments,” he explains.
Nick is a first-year master’s student at Columbia University in the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (QMSS) program. His research focuses on stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. He is especially interested in sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and racism through the lens of attribution and structural stigma. Nick also hopes to explore how support systems within these marginalized communities foster resilience in the face of inequality.
When asked why he chose to train with CAnD3, he says he was inspired by the mission to provide data-driven support for our changing society. “It is imperative that we develop a strong foundation of knowledge to address our growing needs. This begins with acknowledging our aging society and providing ample support while also addressing gaps in our knowledge, especially regarding intersecting identities and domains of life.”
Nick explains that the most meaningful part of the training has been CAnD3’s philosophy on research and methodology on data accessibility and collaboration.
Nick has been training for his first half-marathon in his spare time! This will be his first time running one. Nick is also a fan of Star Wars and loves cooking, which he finds is an intersection of science and art.
Nick is currently preparing a publication examining the degree to which religion has a palliative function for both Black and White churchgoers. The findings indicate that religion has a palliative function for White churchgoers, meaning that they support hierarchy-enhancing policies, while Black churchgoers support hierarchy-attenuating policies.
“What makes me most passionate about my research is that I am constantly learning about how to be a better person. What’s more, I am thrilled to contribute to a meaningful movement and work with innovative and creative people.”
You can learn more about Nick and connect with him here.
About the training program
The Population Analytics in an Aging Society Training Program is a rigorous one-year fellowship hosted by the Consortium on Analytics for Data-Driven Decision-Making (CAnD3), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and based at McGill University. The program upskills rising researchers in Master's, PhD, and postdoctoral programs in the areas of population data science and computational population social science from a multidisciplinary lens. It also connects Fellows to experiential learning opportunities, which include hands-on research projects and internships with government, not-for-profit, and private sector CAnD3 partners. Since the first year of the program in 2020, CAnD3 has trained 32 Fellows and welcomes 20 new Fellows for the 2022-23 Academic Year.
