The "myth of the irrevocably damaged coke baby" is the target of Claudia Kernan's dissertation in clinical psychology. Examining a group of stimulant-exposed youngsters at the time they were adopted and again one year later, Claudia found that the children displayed "significant increases in IQ after being in a loving, stable, adoptive home for a year."

Claudia met the youngsters who were part of her study through an internship with Training, Intervention, Education, and Services (TIES) for Adoption, a collaboration between UCLA and county agencies to promote successful adoption of foster children with histories of prenatal substance exposure, abuse, and neglect. In that assignment, Claudia made home visits to mothers who had just adopted children, "observing their strategies for discipline and offering support." As needed, she also modeled "ways to handle problem behaviors." Through another externship—this one at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI)—Claudia learned applications of neuropsychology while working on projects related to long-term epilepsy and to memory and aging.

The two streams of experience came together in her dissertation, with neuropsychology providing the theoretical template and children adopted from foster care providing the population of focus. Jill Waterman, a UCLA faculty member and a founder of TIES, and Robert Asarnow, a senior research scientist in the NPI's Cognitive Neuroscience Initiative, are her co-chairs.

The pool of TIES children who participated in Claudia's study were four to eight years old when they were adopted. "On top of the biological risk associated with stimulant exposure," these youngsters "also had experienced a lot of environmental risk," she says, living with birth mothers in a drug-abusing environment and then moving through a number of foster placements, some of them featuring abuse or neglect, on their way to adoption.

Claudia says the goal of her research was to move from the "focus on whether or not cocaine has an independent effect on IQ" to examine "why some kids do better than others." In her study, some children with prenatal exposure to stimulants had significant cognitive problems while others were doing quite well. Both biological factors (such as smaller birth size, which is associated with drug use) and environmental factors (such as adverse foster care experiences) are important in determining outcomes. Being adopted into a permanent, loving home can often ameliorate the negative impacts of early biological and social trauma.

At the beginning of her graduate career at UCLA, Claudia was involved in research about interethnic conflict on high school sports teams, and that was the project she outlined in her proposal for a Ford Fellowship and pursued for her master's thesis. The work is about to be published under the title, "Becoming a Team: Individualism, Collectivism, and Group Socialization in Los Angeles Girls' Basketball," in Ethos, one of anthropology's most prestigious journal. In a fortuitous irony, however, the Ford Fellowship "gave me the freedom to pursue more of my clinical interests," Claudia says, and she chose to move away from her original project to design research addressing issues of importance to the population she worked with clinically.

Although Claudia's dissertation topic changed over the term of her Ford Fellowship, her interest in human behavior, and in particular cognitive issues, is long-standing. The daughter of two well-known UCLA anthropologists, Claudia majored in anthropology as an undergraduate at Princeton University. "I still have a love of anthropology, and I try to include some of those methods in my work," Claudia says, "but I'm more attracted to clinical psychology because of its applied aspects—I enjoy working with the children."

She's doing just that this fall. Having successfully defended her dissertation, Claudia is fulfilling her required one-year internship for a degree in clinical psychology by working in pediatric neuropsychology in a program sponsored by North Shore University and New York University. She recently received the UCLA Women's Faculty Club scholarship, a merit award for sons or daughters of faculty members.

Besides supporting her graduate education and giving her time and space to explore new directions, the Ford Fellowship also provided Claudia with valued social and professional connections. She met Brendesha Tynes, another UCLA Ford Fellow, when they "coached each other through the application process." Preparing a successful proposal is hard work, Claudia says; "making sure that it's clear, concise, and comprehensive was challenging."

A couple of years later, Claudia lent a hand when Brendesha organized a Southern California Conference of Ford Fellows. The best part of the Fall 2004 conference, Claudia says, was "that I got a chance to talk to people who were interested in applying for the Ford," passing along some of the support she had received at earlier conferences.

She continues to connect with people she met at a national conference of Ford Fellows, and the lessons she took away remain powerful: "The conference helped strengthen my sense of belonging to a larger community of minorities in academia," she says, and emphasized "the importance of giving back to your community—there are a lot of Ford Fellows who are setting that example."

Published in Fall 2005, Graduate Quarterly