MMI’s Dr. Mathews awarded Fulbright scholarship

Judith Mathews, Ph.D., an associate professor of pediatric psychology at MMI, was recently awarded a Fulbright scholarship.

The Fulbright program is a prestigious international educational exchange program designed to solve shared international issues.

Dr. Mathews is one of approximately 1,100 American scholars who received the competitive scholarship. She’s in good company as more Fulbright alumni have won the Nobel Prize than those of any other academic program.

Judith Mathews, Ph.D.

As a continuation of her capstone project for her Master’s in Public Health degree, Dr. Mathews will conduct community-based participatory research in Nairobi, Kenya for about six months beginning in December.

While there she will teach adolescent girls to make positive changes in their communities just as she has done through Girls Inc. in Omaha.

“I’m very honored to receive this scholarship,” she said. “I hope I can connect girls of different cultures together to help them see that they can do anything.”

One of her Girls Inc. projects led to a lead poisoning prevention health fair and the other resulted in an educational program on child abuse prevention.

“Girls, especially those in low-income communities, need to be encouraged to feel like they can make changes in their community,” Dr. Mathews said. “In Kenya, girls have fewer opportunities than males. The hope is to boost their self confidence and teach them that they can make a difference in their lives and the lives of people around them.”

More from MMI This story originally appeared in the Spring 2010 edition of MMInfo. View the full newsletter online.

For the project, girls will identify issues specific to their communities by taking pictures and then develop, implement and evaluate an intervention. To do this, they will utilize the “Community Toolbox,” which is a free resource website that connects people from all over the world.

Girls from Girls Inc. and Nairobi will run parallel projects, and share ideas and data through a workstation on the Community Toolbox.

Dr. Mathews hopes to collect enough outcome data to analyze the project’s impact on the girls, and whether it helps them become leaders in their communities.

In addition to administering the community-based participatory research project, she also will teach at Kenyatta University.