Published on May 3, 2021

Della Cox is a junior from University City, Missouri, majoring in Sociology and Statistics and minoring in French. She became involved in undergraduate research as a freshman when she was accepted into the MU Honors College’s CIRCA Scholars Program. She has since continued developing her research skills, both academic and applied. For academic research, she has conducted a secondary analysis with Dr. Joan Hermsen on COVID-19 risk-reducing behavior using the Axios Ipsos Coronavirus Index national survey. She presented her results at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society. She is also a member of the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Scholars Program Minority Focused News research team, led by Dr. Christopher Josey and Dr. Andrea Figueroa-Caballero. This team studies minority representation in minority-run news media and was chosen to present the group’s research at the 2021 Undergraduate Research Day at the Capitol. Currently, she is working with an interdisciplinary research team from the Sociology and Communication departments led by Dr. Rebecca Scott and Dr. Haley Horstman to research through interviews how parents have experienced their children’s education during the pandemic. For applied research, she has volunteered at A Red Circle, a racial equity non-profit in St. Louis, where she did exploratory research to draft program descriptions and analyses of the impact, scope, and necessity of A Red Circle’s initiatives. She is currently working with an interdisciplinary group of researchers in her service-learning class to assess the needs of the community served by the Family Impact Center and Career Awareness Related Experience and suggest how their programs could be improved to better meet those needs. In Summer 2021 she will work with the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control as a researcher at Simon Fraser University to research public health messaging and give policy recommendations. She hopes these research experiences will prepare her to influence public policy in her career as a social science researcher.