A Community of Researchers

At Trinity University, research works best when done together: collaborating across disciplines, viewpoints, communities, and even generations.

And there’s perhaps no better case study than a $2.2 million project currently unfolding in the jointly run lab of psychology professor Carolyn Becker, Ph.D., and her former student Lisa Smith Kilpela ’04, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center-San Antonio ( UT Health SA) School of Medicine, in the Center for Research to Advance Community Health (ReACH Center).

Becker and Kilpela’s project, which dates back to 2016 and is now funded through the National Institute on Aging, examines the Prospective Health Impacts of Chronic Binge Eating Disorder in Hispanic Older Women Living with Food Insecurity (PROSPERA). It will study the impact of Binge Eating Disorder on the health of Latina women over 50 years of age over a two-year period.

It’s a staggering collaboration for a number of reasons. There’s a remarkable community-building partnership between Trinity and UT Health SA (who each provide co-principal investigators on the project) and the San Antonio Food Bank (where the data are being gathered). And just about everywhere you look, there’s a Trinity connection: Kilpela was Becker’s student and research partner as an undergrad, while the pair are also joined on the project by fellow Trinity alumna Salomé Wilfred ’14, Ph.D., a postdoc at UT Health SA who’s another former student of Becker’s.

This project is a cautionary tale for any prospective Trinity researcher, Becker says. 

“You can leave Trinity, but I don't let you go,” she says, laughing. “We hold on—and we hold onto—these partnerships and collaborations and friendships, and that’s what makes us successful in the first place.”

INNOVATIVE RESEARCH

As a psychology researcher, this study fits right into Becker’s wheelhouse, and that of her proteges. For decades, Becker’s expertise has focused on various elements of cognitive and behavior therapy, particularly in the areas of eating disorders, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and exposure therapy.

Many Trinity alumni will recognize Becker’s involvement on the Body Project, a positive body image program at Trinity (which has gone by various names over the years) that addressed many related socio-cultural components of the current food bank project, and in some ways served as a springboard to Becker’s current work.

Becker says she “bounces all over the place in large part because I listen to what my students are interested in researching. Many of my ‘best ideas’ were not my ideas: they were my students’.”

That’s a common theme at Trinity, which draws faculty like Becker because of the chance to treat students as true collaborators. And that mindset created the eating disorder food insecurity project in 2016.

“For the Food Bank partnership, I had two students, Bridget Taylor ’16 and Clara Johnson ’16, come to me and say, ‘Hey Dr. Becker, we really want to work with you, but we want to work with marginalized communities here in San Antonio,’” Becker recalls. “I suddenly was like, ‘Wait a minute, what if we looked at eating disorder pathology in people with food insecurity?’”

Becker also notes that former Trinity political science professor Keisha Middlemass, Ph.D., (now at Howard University and the Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Brookings Institution) played a role in shaping the direction of the project.

“I remember getting looked at like I'd grown two heads because the stereotype for eating disorders is that this is a problem confined to reasonably affluent, young, thin white women,” Becker says. “But that means anybody who deviates from that stereotype has largely been ignored because nobody in the field thought of people with food insecurity as being at risk for an eating disorder. So, this was really groundbreaking research coming out of Trinity.”

Over the past eight years, the project has evolved, officially, into a series of studies examining the negative psychological factors associated with food insecurity, including but not limited to eating disorder pathology. 

“Food insecurity can range from mild to quite severe and very severe,” Becker adds. “The most severe level of food insecurity is when adults are reporting they have hungry children at home. Because if your children are hungry, then the general presumption is that adults are even more hungry because they're going to prioritize feeding children over themselves. Our research indicates that those living with the highest level of food insecurity also have the greatest eating disorder pathology, depression, and anxiety.”

COLLABORATIVE APPROACH

As the project has grown into a multi-million-dollar study involving ambitious, cross-community partnerships, the work has thrived thanks to a series of Trinity connections.

Becker and Kilpela, for example, first met in Becker’s psychopathology class.

“I had no clue what psychopathology even meant, but my friend told me it was a great class,” Kilpela says. “I scored an A on my first exam, and [Becker] asked if I wanted to join her lab.”

Kilpela, who would graduate from Trinity in 2004 with a major in psychology, went on to earn her doctorate from Emory University and interned at Duke University School of Medicine before joining the faculty at the UT Health SA. And the whole time, she and Becker found ways to stay connected, including returning to Trinity to do postdoctoral research before joining UT Health SA.

“We continued to collaborate while I went to graduate school, through my internship, we just never stopped working together, and she always served as a mentor for me,” Kilpela says. “Whenever I needed guidance, I would call her up and she always made time, never a question about it.”

And Wilfred, a current postdoc at UT Health SA who’s lending her expertise to the PROSPERA project, remembers the magnetic pull of Becker as an undergraduate as well.

“I actually didn't have much of an interest in research when I first came to Trinity,” Wilfred says. “But [Becker] does a really phenomenal job of allowing you to make the research your own. I'd never seen a lot of women of color in research, so I just kind of never envisioned myself doing that until she gave me the ability to do that.” 

Wilfred, who went on to receive her doctorate from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and completed her internship at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine, was also unable to escape the pull of collaborating with Becker and Kilpela after leaving Trinity’s campus.

“We just never stopped working together. Virtual happy hours on Zoom during the pandemic—we kept writing together, and kept working together, and kept problem-solving together through all sorts of things,” Wilfred says. 

ACTIVE IMPACT

Kilpela says that active problem-solving is a key component of the current $2.2 million award. Yes, the team is studying an underserved group of women, but the work is also making an impact on this population beyond the study.

“As a part of the grant, we wrote in significant give-back to the clientele of the San Antonio Food Bank, who are called ‘neighbors,’” Kilpela says. “Neighbors will be getting free phone counseling sessions as well as access to a community health worker who will be able to offer navigation services for health care. We're doing point-of-care testing [with blood test screenings], and they get the results immediately. We're able to then give neighbors their medical feedback right away on their health status and connect them with health care as needed. And we will hold annual virtual food drives for the food bank, as well as give annual volunteer hours. I think that's a really innovative piece that I haven't seen written into other grants like this.”

Wilfred says this aspect of the research is meaningful during a political and economic period when many underserved communities are seeing a frustrating series of disinvestment in public resources and opportunities.

“There are so many marginalized people who are missing out in terms of programs being defunded, and I think it's been sad to see,” Wilfred says. “I think what this study does is bring it back to them to an extent and allows us to be one example how people can stay dedicated to serving these kinds of spaces that are losing money and saying, ‘No, we're not giving up on this yet.’”

That’s why, Becker adds, the community ties are such a meaningful aspect of the research. “You're seeing three major institutions here in the city of San Antonio: UT Health San Antonio, Trinity University, and the San Antonio Food Bank, collaborating in a way that we have not done before across those lines to accomplish something that none of us could have done individually,” she says. “This really represents the type of community that we have here in San Antonio.

MORE THAN A MENTOR

Having a team that knows how to research together is crucial for a project with the type of impact the PROSPERA study has, the group says. But having a team that has stayed together because it wants to work together elevates the process, too.

“This type of research is so much bigger than I ever thought I would do at Trinity,” Becker says. “When I came to Trinity, I quickly realized that by fostering the right types of collaborations and the right types of partnerships, both with students and then with other collaborators, we were able to do studies that were much bigger than what I originally envisioned. And that’s because students like Salomé and Lisa showed me that we could do things that were bigger.”

As a testament to this approach to mentoring, Becker was recently honored with the Lawrence H. Cohen Outstanding Mentor Award from the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology, the first-ever liberal arts college professor to receive the honor (usually given to faculty at doctoral programs). “We've been so successful,” Becker notes, “at getting students [like Lisa and Salomé] into clinical psychology doctoral programs as an undergraduate, liberal arts institution.”

In short, $2.2 million projects are possible for researchers like Wilfred and Kilpela because faculty like Becker invest in them as undergraduates, and as people, first.

“After going on to get my master's degree and seeing what my cohort had been exposed to as undergrads was drastically different,” Wilfred says. “I was actually running projects; I had a very thorough understanding of how research worked, and how to create a study. I think having the foundation of [Becker’s] lab set me up to be able to do research independently. And that’s thanks to the experience I had at Trinity with her.”

Kilpela notes that she originally wanted to be a physician or a lawyer (Becker laughs as she recalls “stealing her as a researcher”). But after her Trinity experience with Becker, Kilpela feels she learned how research can be just as active and impactful as any other profession.

“Now, I’m actually able to do studies that impact real people,” Kilpela says. “And one of the things that sets Carolyn above a lot of other folks is that she's exceptional at throwing us in the deep end and letting us figure out new questions to shape our research. And you know what? You learn how to be a really amazing swimmer when you're thrown in the deep end.”

As the group gears up to continue building out and implementing their $2.2 million grant, Becker is thrilled to be throwing her former students in the deep end once more.

“At Trinity, you learn to trust your students. You have to trust their passion. You give students a lot of [leeway] to show you that they can do more than you ever thought possible,” Becker says. “I have found that if you give our students the chance to really fly, they go places that I never thought was possible. And that's been one of the great things about being here.”