Major: Psychology
Minors: Sociology, Victimology, Human Rights
Hometown: North Platte, NE
When choosing her experiential learning research project, Ally focused on a topic she was passionate about that fit well within her field of study.
“I have a strong interest in working with survivors of sexual violence, domestic violence, and trauma. This led me to work on Katie Bogen’s dissertation project. The project focused on bi+ women who had experienced sexual violence (SV) and were now vulnerable to intimate partner violence (IPV) by a partner who was aware of this SV history,” says Ally.
The research was conducted in the Women’s Integrative Sexual Health (WISH) lab. “I joined the project in August 2024 and have been working alongside Katie, two other undergraduate students, and a first-year clinical psychology graduate student,” says Ally.
Planned lab duties for the project included meeting weekly with Principal Investigator (PI) Katie Bogen and the research team to discuss study progress, reviewing survey responses for data integrity, recontacting survey participants for three and six month surveys, presenting at the Association for Women in Psychology conference, translating feminist science for a scholarly audience, and co-authoring an academic journal article.
At the beginning of March 2025, the team traveled to Santa Fe and presented research analyzing previously collected WISH lab data at the Association for Women in Psychology conference. By mid-March, the team discovered they had lost their National Institute of Health (NIH) funding, due to the research aligning with diversity initiatives.
“Prior to this, we had created literature reviews to gain more background information on the current research and developed and tested our surveys. We were about to start recruiting participants when we found out that the funding was terminated by the NIH,” says Ally. “This meant that we could no longer continue our research.”
While this was disappointing for the research project team, PI Katie Bogen plans to finish her dissertation by analyzing previously collected data from the WISH lab and/or Violence Intervention for Survivors of Trauma and Abuse (VISTA) lab.
“Katie has welcomed the team to continue on the new projects and gain more research experience; it will just look different than initially planned,” says Ally.
As for her post-graduation plans, Ally is looking forward to starting her Master of Social Work at the University of Nebraska Omaha this fall.
