February 14, 2019

Sigma Xi’s Grants in Aid of Research (GIAR) program awards research grants to undergraduate and graduate students. Application deadlines are March 15 and October 1 annually.

Grant awarded:
$1,000 in spring 2015 

Education level at the time of grant:
PhD candidate

Research Discipline: Psychology

How the funds were used:
She purchased electroencephalography (EEG) equipment suitable for a pediatric population for her project.

Goal of the project:
This project aimed to correlate behavioral and electrophysiological responses of bilingual children during an inhibitory control task. She carried out a pilot project to examine how bilingual children suppress competing information and pay attention to contextually relevant information while carrying out a competing listening task. Unfortunately, she was not successful in collecting quality EEG data for 
the project.

How this project influenced her as a scientist:
“It helped me understand how to control external variables in an electrophysiological line of research. It also helped me to be open to constructive criticisms and suggestions from other scientists. This project opened a lot of other funding opportunities for me.”

Where is she now?
Kaipa earned her PhD in 2018 and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Science and Disorders at Oklahoma State University. Her current work focuses on examining the effects of multilingualism on linguistic and cognitive processing in multilinguals using behavioral as well as electrophysiological outcome measures. “The experience I gained from the pilot project funded by Sigma Xi was valuable in setting up my later EEG projects,” she said.