Courtney Cogburn Receives Provost’s Diversity Grant for Work on Media Coverage of Ferguson
Assistant Professor Courtney D. Cogburn has been selected to receive a Provost's Grants Program Award for Junior Faculty Who Contribute to the Diversity Goals of the University, for a project titled “Black Face to Ferguson: A Mixed Methodological Examination of Media Racism, Media Activism and Health.”
“With the support of the grant award, Assistant Professor Cogburn will extend her research focus on the role of racism in producing racial disparities in stress-related diseases,” said Dean Jeanette Takamura. “She will build on two laboratory-based experiments that she conducted as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, demonstrating that exposure to racism in the media negatively affects caridiovascular functioning in both Blacks and Whites.” She added that Dr. Cogburn’s precise research topic, which focuses on the role of the media in the controversy surrounding the killing of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, “could not be more timely or more important in light of what is happening nationwide.”
At the end of 2014, Dr. Cogburn was interviewed by the New York office of the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, about the protests held in response to recent grand jury decisions not to indict the police officers involved in the death of Michael Brown in Missouri and the death of another unarmed black man, Eric Garner, in Staten Island, New York.
Dr. Cogburn is the third junior faculty member at our School to receive this award since the program’s creation in 2012. Professor Leo Cabassa was in the May 2013 group of awardees for his work on developing lifestyle interventions for minorities; and Professor Lynn Michaelopolous received the award in March 2014 for her work on behalf of trauma victims in Zambia.
