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CUNY SPH Assistant Professor Karen Flórez was awarded the 2022 Junior Faculty Research Award in Science and Engineering, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The $50,000 research foundation grant will fund a study to understand how poverty affects and interacts with cognitive burden in affecting healthy purchasing behavior by exploiting a natural experiment within the administration of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program (SNAP) to Latino adults in New York City.
Recent studies suggest that budgetary concerns decrease the cognitive bandwidth necessary to make several optimal choices at once, limiting a person’s ability to make healthy choices when purchasing food, says Flórez.
“Exploring these ideas among Latino adults is hugely important to my growing research agenda, especially at this stage in my career when I seek to increase my profile as a health equity scholar,” she says.
A panel of reviewers chose Flórez for this highly selective award because they were convinced of the project’s potential to make a significant contribution to the field, to CUNY, and to society. Flórez joins a select group of only 26 CUNY faculty who have won this award since 2012.
