Fuller Professor Joey Fung Part of Team Awarded $3.5 million NIH R01 Grant

Fuller Seminary is pleased to congratulate Professor Joey Fung as part of a team that received a prestigious five-year, $3.5 million R01 award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Fung is the director of Fuller’s Travis Research Institute and an associate professor of psychology in the Clinical Psychology Department in Fuller’s School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

The grant, titled, “Project STRIVE (Students Rising Above)—Offsetting the Health and Mental Health Costs of Resilience,” seeks to identify minority students who are academically resilient in the face of disadvantage and offers a tailored mindfulness intervention to those students. Black, Latinx, and Asian American adolescents from marginalized communities who “strive” to rise above systemic racism and early adversity to achieve are considered “resilient.” However, resilience in one domain (e.g., academic) can come at a cost in other domains (e.g., physical or mental health) that are under-identified and under-treated. This is known as the “hidden cost of resilience.” Project STRIVE will test the extent to which the mindfulness intervention can impact self-regulation mechanisms to promote student physical and mental health, while preserving academic resilience.

The principal investigator for this project is Anna Lau from UCLA, while Fung is joined as a co-investigator by Stacey Doan from Claremont McKenna College and Farzana Saleem from Stanford University. The grant term started in May 2022 and runs through May 1, 2026. The team also received a MERIT R37 Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which provides an additional five years of funding.

Learn more about Travis Research Institute and its ongoing research projects.