By Erin Jester
As a student, it can be challenging to get the resources to do immediately impactful research.
“Oftentimes, you’re incrementally advancing the science,” said Joy Gabrielli, Ph.D., ABPP, an associate professor in the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions Department of Clinical and Health Psychology and director of the Youth Risk and Resilience Lab.
Not so for Amanda Bennett, a fifth-year doctoral student whose dissertation project recently caught the attention of the American Psychological Foundation and earned her a sizeable fellowship.
Earlier this month, the APF awarded Bennett the Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz Fellowship, the largest fellowship for graduate and doctoral students researching child psychology, for the development of a digital tool that could dramatically improve support available to youth in foster care.
Bennett is the first UF student to win the prestigious award. The funding will allow her to continue to develop the tool throughout the 2025-26 academic year, while she does her clinical internship at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
The tool, called MyWeb, takes young people through a detailed survey about who in their life gives them emotional, informational, instrumental or companionship support, with specific definitions for each support type. Users also rate the strength of the support and answer questions about how the people providing support are connected.
The result is a visual representation of a young person’s social support network, which provides detailed information at a glance. Bennett developed the program in collaboration with former UF computer science student Athitheya Gobinathan. He is now a master’s student in computer science at Columbia University.
Bennett said the goal is to see how interconnected a child’s support network is while strengthening connections between caretakers and other network members and helping them understand how to better support the child.
The impetus to create the tool came from her qualifying exam project. Bennett performed a systematic review of existing social support interventions for youth in foster care and found that prior research lacked comprehensive measurement of social support systems. Bennett also learned through her master’s project that little has been done to understand fully how many different perpetrators of abuse youth in foster care have had.
Intake workers ask foster children about abuse, and sometimes have documentation on abusive behavior from people in the child’s life.
But there are different kinds and degrees of abuse, and without examining all the people in the child’s life contributing to maltreatment, foster children can sometimes end up in the home of a family member who will continue to do harm.
Bennett started quantifying perpetrators of abuse and created visual networks to see how they were connected to each other.
“She’s one of the first people in the world to have done this work,” Gabrielli said. “The output of her projects has direct clinical impact.”
For her dissertation, Bennett decided to pursue the visual network idea to get a more granular understanding of the people who have a positive impact on a child and how they’re connected.
Often, Gabrielli said, children are simply asked who supports them, with few or no detailed follow-up questions.
This was an obvious measurement gap, Bennett said. “How do you intervene on something when you’re not properly measuring it?”
For example, if the foster care system suggests placing a child with a family on one side of a city but their support network is outside that area, access to that support could be cut off. A child might get financial support from both of their parents, but if the relationship between the parents is not a good one, the emotional support may be lacking.
MyWeb, Bennett said, can help care workers see where the deficiencies are and use that information to improve foster placements and case planning.
Currently, she is working on user experience by walking study participants through the MyWeb survey and collecting their feedback on usability. She’s specifically focusing on young adults who are aging out of foster care for her dissertation research, but in the future she wants to adjust the tool so younger children can also use it.
“Her dissertation project has huge potential for impact,” Gabrielli said. “The applications are massive.”
Gabrielli also received the Koppitz Fellowship while she was a doctoral student at the University of Kansas, which she said helped her gain attention in the greater psychology community and propelled her work forward.
“It’s a real honor,” she said, adding that in addition to supporting Bennett’s project, the prestigious award will bring national attention to the department and increase the likelihood that UF’s child psychology students can secure funding for their own projects.
Bennett said she’s happy with MyWeb now, but there is more that could be done to make it more useful, such as tailoring it for use by different ages and adding more customization options for users.
“I feel very excited, very grateful,” she said. “Now we have the support we need to make the best possible version of this that we can.”