NHS grad student earns Presidential Scholarship

NHS doctoral student Elisha Hall earns Presidential Fellowship.
NHS doctoral student Elisha Hall earns Presidential Fellowship.

Nutrition and Health Sciences doctoral student Elisha Hall has earned a University of Nebraska Presidential Scholarship for the 2015-16 school year. She is one of just six recipients across the NU system. These prestigious fellowships honor a select group of NU graduate students each year based on high scholastic performance and personal accomplishment. She will receive a stipend provided through the NU Foundation that allows her to pursue her studies full-time.

Hall, of Lincoln, has a goal to fight socioeconomic-related nutrition disparities to improve community health and well-being. Poor nutrition can affect school performance, sleep patterns, illness, chronic disease development and mental health; Hall said she believes each leads to a domino effect of other problems.

Her research in the field has already made significant impacts on industry literature: Hall developed, validated and piloted a survey that measured nutrition-based knowledge, behaviors and self-efficacy in fifth-graders, finding important disparities between students at low-income and high-income schools.

Hall's doctoral research evaluates an interactive elementary nutrition education program, examines the relationships between social cognitive theory constructs for low- and high-income groups, and explores rarely studied perspectives of teachers on classroom-based nutrition programming. Hall plans to one day teach and research in the field as a university professor. She hopes to create and evaluate programs that address the complexity of family life to in turn reduce health disparities, especially in children.

For more information on the Presidential Fellows, please click the link below.

More details at: http://go.unl.edu/kpbr