Congratulations to EWU McNair Scholar Lily Ann Long! Lily Ann has been selected to receive the Dean Jeffers W. Chertok Honored Student Award for the College of Social Sciences, Psychology. This award is presented to exceptional students who have shown a commitment to their education by demonstrating outstanding academic achievement with a minimum of a 3.75 GPA in their previous four quarters and through leadership and service to the community. Lily Ann has interned at First Call for Help Spokane as a crisis advocate where she answered crisis calls as well as organizing and implementing training for new volunteers. From December 2019 through June 2020 Lily Ann has continued her crisis advocacy through Crisis Text Line United States. She has also volunteered as an EWU Student Mentor for Cheney Middle School, a crisis advocate at the Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery, and a warming shelter volunteer at the Seattle Dinner Church. She holds an Activist in Residence Training Certificate as well as a Certificate in Suicide Prevention.
Beyond her exceptional community involvement, Lily Ann is a brilliant, hard working scholar. She is a senior at EWU majoring in Psychology with a minor in Applied Developmental Psychology. Throughout her time at Eastern, Lily Ann has received the Len Stern Endowed Research Award, a College Bound Scholarship, and an EWU McNair Summer Research Internship. She has been on the EWU Dean's List from Fall 2015 through graduation, and the Excellent Student Leader Award from the Department of Political Science and International Affairs. She is also a member of Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology.
Lily Ann has done extensive research while at Eastern. Her research interests include marginalization, stigmatization, attachment disorders, and suicide prevention. She is a research assistant in both Dr. Martin's Social Psychology Lab and Dr. Kolts' Clinical Pscyhology Research Lab. As a part of Dr. Theresa Martin's Psychology 313 Research Methods course, Lily Ann designed and completed a quantitative study of the impact of the EWU Psychology curriculum on students' stigmatization of mental health disorders. Through independent study with Dr. Kolts she is exploring the co-occurrence of complex trauma and childhood gender dysphoria and how it relates to adult gender identity. In addition, she collected, synthesized, and presented research on prospective donors for EWU Advancement Services.
As a McNair Scholar, Lily Ann has committed to attaining a Ph.D. Beyond all of her above research, to further prepare for her Ph.D., she completed an EWU McNair Summer Research Internship under the mentorship of Dr. Aryn Zeihnert where she began a research project on shame as a function of academic distress in populations of first-generation, low-income, and minority students. She also worked as a Teaching Assistant for Dr. Zeihnert from the spring of 2019 through Winter 2020. Finaaly, Lily Ann presented the research she worked on with Dr. Martin, "Ghosting as a Dissolution Tactic in Romantic Relationships," at the EWU Symposium in 2019. To read more about Lily Ann and her research check out her webpage on the McNair site.
Lily Ann has been accepted into Point Park University's PsyD Program and plans to attend in the fall of 2020. EWU McNair is so proud of Lily Ann and all of her hard work. We know she will have a continued powerful impact on the field of psychology and beyond!
