Charles Harrington - US grants

0332650
Brown

This award is to University of North Carolina at Pembroke to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF-03521).

Partners
The partners include University of North Carolina at Pembroke (Lead Institution), Central Carolina Community College, Fayetteville Tech Community College, Richmond Community College, Robeson Community College, Southeastern Community College, Carolina Commerce and Technology Center, Embrex Incorporated, Kelly Scientific Resources, New Brunswick Scientific Company, Wyeth Vaccines, Lumber River Council of Governments/Workforce Development Board, Robeson Office of Economic Development, and Scotland County Government.

This award supports regional efforts to foster the establishment and growth of a biotechnology cluster in southeastern North Carolina. It has a broad goal to stimulate economic growth and increase the economic well being of the region. The University of North Carolina Pembroke Regional Center for Economic, Community and Professional Development will coordinate the establishment of a University of North Carolina Pembroke Biotechnology Business and Industrial Training Center. The center will house a bench-to-pilot-scale fermentation and biotechnology facility and will provide the resources, curriculum, and programs for biotechnology-related training, as well as academic activities. The goals for the activity are to increase the number of regional higher paying jobs by accelerating the growth of biotechnology companies, increase the trained workforce in the biotechnology sector, mobilize the underrepresented populations in the region by providing training, and offer entrepreneurs technological and business support, including connections to sources of capital.

Potential Economic Impact
Southeastern North Carolina is economically distressed. The effort will provide education and training for underrepresented groups to make them employable by an emerging biotechnology cluster sector. The availability of a workforce will help attract other biotechnology companies creating more jobs. The effort is part of North Carolina's Biotechnology Initiative.

The intellectual merit of the activity lies in its focus on providing state-of-the-art knowledge and skills in biotechnology to academic and industrial participants. It will serve as a model for academic-led economic development that can be transferred to other economically distressed rural regions.

The broader impacts of the activity include improving technical workforce skills and training K-16 teachers in biotechnology, increasing participation of underrepresented group in the innovation enterprise, and increasing the economic well being of a distressed region.

Disruptive behavior disorders are relatively recent classifications in psychiatry and represent a trend to medicalize behavior. Alongside this development, American youth within the juvenile justice system have fallen under added psychiatric scrutiny and increasingly have been diagnosed with these disorders. Few scholars have addressed mental illness and juvenile detention and fewer have studied girls specifically, whose experiences may be unique. This study asks three critical questions about the process and experience of psychiatric diagnosis among female youth court-ordered to residential treatment in New York. First, what is the history of these diagnostic categories, and how might their history parallel developments in mental health interventions that target criminalized and poor youth of color? Second, how are these diagnoses used (or potentially challenged) by juvenile justice gatekeepers to identify and label youth from particular backgrounds as "problematic"? Third, how do youth, their families, and other members of the residential community understand, embrace and/or challenge these labels?

This study takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing first on literature in psychological and medical anthropology and integrated, in turn, with work on pathology and criminality in psychology and sociology. Through participant observation, interviews with youth, their guardians, and treatment center staff, and archival research on case records, data will be collected to elucidate how psychiatric diagnoses are assigned, experienced and reformulated in this community.

Such data have practical implications for juvenile justice and public health. The importance of understanding how mental health and illness intersect with the juvenile justice system cannot be underestimated, particularly when this population is disproportionately minority and from the lowest socioeconomic brackets of society. Furthermore, as the number of female youth in detention rises, it is imperative that policy-makers understand the changing face of this population and consider the unique ways that female deviance is folded into mental illness.