Hello! My name is Josh Steinberg and this is my second post of the summer as a research assistant in the CASI student research program.

As you may recall, I am a research assistant in the DeRubeis Lab, a psychology lab at Penn. I am involved in research regarding student mental health in India.

My time in the DeRubeis Lab has been divided over a few projects so far.

First, I have been involved in analyzing and writing up data from a trial of an online mental health intervention for Indian college students at Ashoka and Jindal (two universities in India). This has been a very enjoyable process for me because I have learned a lot about data cleaning and analysis. However, this has also been the most challenging part of my work because it has required me to learn more about how to work with large datasets in a new programming language.

Additionally, I’m working on one project investigating the perceptions of Indian adolescents toward those with mental illness for the purposes of assessing stigma in this group, and I’m also working on a project that involves determining which symptoms of mental illness (e.g., anxiety and depression) are perceived as being the most important (i.e., impairing) in a sample of Indian college students. Overall, I am enjoying this work very much and I am getting to see how social scientists go about answering important research questions related to mental health. I am looking forward to finding answers to some of these questions as the summer wraps up.

Thank you for reading!

Best,

Josh