Home

Dr. Danielle Nadorff, Associate Professor, Undergraduate Coordinator for the Department of Psychology, and Director of the Grandfamilies Lab, has been recognized this spring for her teaching and research. She was competitively selected for the Ottilie Schillig Special Teaching Projects Award through Mississippi State University's Center for Innovation in Teaching Excellence (CITE), and she was awarded $100,000 through Mississippi's Opioid Settlement Funds to lead a statewide public health research project in partnership with the Mississippi Department of Mental Health (DMH). The Schillig Award funds her project Broadening Discovery: Expanding Undergraduate Research Access in Psychology. The review committee selected the proposal from a highly competitive pool and highlighted its strength and potential impact on undergraduate education. The course-based research experience is designed to reach more of the program's roughly 800 majors, many of whom have not previously had access to faculty-lab placements. About 45 students each Spring will develop an original project using the General Social Survey, culminating in a poster presentation at the MSU Undergraduate Research Symposium. The award also establishes an in-house poster printing facility in the department, a sustainable resource for future coursework. The Opioid Settlement Funds award builds directly on Dr. Danielle Nadorff's ongoing research through the Grandfamilies Lab on older adults, chronic pain, and grandparents raising grandchildren affected by parental substance use, populations central to the state's opioid response. As principal investigator on the Mississippi Blues: A Statewide Needs Assessment on Opioid Misuse and Recovery project, she will partner with the Wolfgang Frese Survey Research Laboratory at MSU and the Mississippi Department of Mental Health to produce the state's first unified, systematic assessment of opioid prevention, treatment, and recovery needs. The project combines analysis of existing public health data with a new statewide telephone and online survey of approximately 1,200 Mississippi adults, with particular attention to adults aged 50 and older, a group often overlooked despite high rates of chronic pain and opioid prescriptions. The resulting report will give legislators, the Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council, and treatment providers across all 82 counties an evidence-based roadmap for directing settlement dollars where they will have the greatest impact. Project work begins July 1, 2026.

Christopher Jolivette, Double Major with Psychology and English, Becomes Ertegun Scholar and Receives Full Ride to Oxford University!