Christopher Owens honored with NSF CAREER Award

Christopher Owens, PhD, MPH, assistant professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health, has been selected as a 2024 recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, a prestigious honor intended to help enhance the careers of promising junior faculty members.

Owens will receive $467,186 in funding for a five-year study to identify and characterize the factors associated with STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) persistence and attrition among a longitudinal cohort of LGBTQ students at Texas A&M University. He will work to identify minority stressors and resiliency factors LGBTQ students encounter throughout their time in a STEM baccalaureate program and examine how the stressors and resiliency factors affect LGBTQ students persisting in and leaving a STEM baccalaureate program.

His previous research has focused on the sexual, physical mental and behavioral health of LGBTQ adolescents and young adults. He was a fellow for the Fordham University HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute in 2021-2022 and served as a fellow for the Inter-Center for AIDS Research Implementation Science.

“I am thankful to the NSF CAREER review committee for accepting my award. This is my second resubmission, so I think persistence is key—the exact persistence we hope to find and build in LGBTQ college students. I’m excited to work with my community advisory board here on campus and with STEM faculty and students to conduct this research,” Owens said.

Each year, the NSF presents an estimated 500 CAREER awards totaling around $250 million to early career faculty at U.S. institutions of higher learning, museums, observatories, research laboratories, professional societies and similar organizations associated with research or educational activities.