She serves as a research assistant in her mentor Dr. Jennifer Ratcliff’s Positive Intergroup Relations Lab, which works on projects evaluating factors that impact students’ sense of belonging on a college campus and that aim to increase self-efficacy for confronting prejudice.
Kalena’s Honors thesis examines how the race of the officer and victim in interactions involving excessive use of force impacts the perceived justifiability and punishment of the officer’s actions. She will be presenting her research at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Denver, Colorado. Kalena plans plan to purse a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology with an emphasis in Forensic Psychology.