News, Profiles
and Moments

Over the summer, I interned with the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program under the Cornell
Cooperative Extension. The main mission of the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program is to enhance the health of at-risk New Yorkers such as low-income communities and senior citizens, and to also promote nutrition education and food skills for everyone overall. Growing up in New York City, there are a lot of neighborhoods which I have never explored before, and this internship gave me the opportunity to engage with communities which I have never engaged with before. One of the main takeaways from this internship was how to be culturally competent in public health settings, because it's crucial to have an open mind and be ready to unlearn any biases to share meaningful stories and to truly engage with the communities you serve. This was a very valuable experience because it was amazing to see how how many community members were grateful to learn new ways to build healthy habits, and to build a balanced diet.

The Chosen Family art exhibit came out of months of collaboration with our two community partners, the Ali Forney Center and the Q Center. Both of these centers serve LGBTQ+ young people, who face family rejection, housing instability and a lack of social support.
We invited youth from the centers to create art reflecting the meaning of chosen family in their lives. And in September, we invited them to the centers for a night of recognition, where they told stories about how they’ve built care networks in their lives and celebrated chosen family. Every piece you see in this gallery is from a young adult or a youth from one of these centers. This exhibit is part of our PRISM study, which is a three-year longitudinal study looking at LGBTQ+ adolescent identity development and what factors help
or hinder that process. Importantly, the decision to study chosen family came directly from our community partners. For me, this process showed what translational research looks like when it's done in genuine partnership. These young people are more
than just research participants. They're artists, storytellers and knowledge holders, and their experiences guide our research just as much as we study it.

So here at the Play and Learning Lab, we're really interested in early childhood cognition and how children learn through play, how parents can scaffold children’s learning and their speech acquisition through everyday means.
I personally really enjoy the lab because I get to play with infants every day. I've gotten to code, I’ve done participant recruitment and now I get to lead some of my own projects. I have a deep passion for early childhood education and working with infants, and that’s my favorite part about being part of the Play and Learning Lab.