F.U.S.E.

Faculty and Undergraduate Scholarship and Engagement

Program Details

Format

Online or in-person

Application Deadline

October 2, 2026

Time Commitment

~5 hours per week

Who Can Apply?

Undergrads

Apply Here

About the Program

The Faculty and Undergraduate Scholarship and Engagement (FUSE) program offers undergraduate students an exciting opportunity to participate in research projects alongside College of Social Work faculty mentors.

Through a research assistantship, students gain hands-on experience, strengthen research and professional skills, and build meaningful mentoring relationships. FUSE helps students connect classroom learning to practical application while preparing for graduate education and careers where research plays an important role.

Who is this Program for?

  • Students enrolled in the BASW or BA/BSCJ programs.
  • Open to both online and on-campus students.
  • Preference will be given to juniors.
  • Students must maintain a minimum 3.0 GPA.
FUSE

Why Join the Program?

  • Gain hands-on experience working alongside faculty mentors on active research projects.
  • Develop valuable skills in critical thinking, data analysis, and professional writing.
  • Build strong mentoring relationships and professional networks.
  • Strengthen graduate school and career applications through research experience.
  • Connect classroom learning to real-world issues and challenges.

F.U.S.E. Student Responsibilities

  • Complete a Forager One profile.
  • Attend an orientation session.
  • Complete the CITI Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) Course.
  • Meet weekly with your faculty mentor (minimum 30 minutes).
  • Dedicate approximately 5 hours per week to your research project.
  • Develop a research plan with your mentor.
  • Maintain a minimum 3.0 GPA.
  • Present at the Showcase of Undergraduate Scholars.*

*Alternative presentation opportunities may be available for students with course conflicts.

Who You'll Work With

Explore faculty mentors and their projects. Each mentor brings unique expertise and research opportunities—from policy analysis to community engagement. You’ll rank your top three mentor preferences when applying.

Carly Kimiecik headshot

Carlyn Kimiecik

Profile
Rebecca Bosetti Headshot

Rebecca Bosetti

Profile

Victoria Collins

Profile

Laneshia Conner

Profile
Portrait of Stephanie Quiring

Stephanie Quiring

Profile

Learn More Before You Apply

Join us for a virtual information session to learn more about FUSE, research opportunities, student expectations, and the application process.

September 23, 2026 | 3:00–4:00 p.m. ET

Register For Info Session

Questions about the program?

Contact Dr. Heather McCauley

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Applications for Spring 2027 research assistantships open September 14 at 8:00 a.m. ET. Don’t miss your opportunity to collaborate with faculty mentors, gain research experience, and strengthen your academic and professional future.

Apply Here

Note: Applications for Spring 2027 close on October 2 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Carlyn Kimiecik

carlykimiecik@uky.edu

Forager One Profile

Bio

Dr. Carly Kimiecik is an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky College of Social Work. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she is informed by her practice experiences in sport for development and college athletics. Carly’s scholarship interests center on advancing health, wellbeing, and positive youth development among youth (ages 10-24) and college student-athletes, with particular attention to leveraging sport and play as meaningful contexts for development and community engagement. Outside of academia, Carly have over ten years of experience in after-school and youth sport programming and college athletics, which continues to inform her teaching, research, and community-engaged initiatives.

Current Projects

  • Community-Engaged Resilience and Youth Sports: A community-engaged research project exploring how natural disasters affect youth sports and community life, while developing a community-focused resilience model to help communities prepare for future disasters.
  • Sport-Based Positive Youth Development Recess Program: A sports-based recess program implemented at local Lexington schools. The program aims to promote youth well-being and positive psychosocial outcomes through structured, sport-based recess activities that teach life skills to elementary students.
  • Sport Social Work and High School Student-Athlete Mental Health: Events and programming designed to support high school student-athlete mental health by enhancing mental health literacy. This work includes a workshop series for students, as well as programming focused on school personnel, coaches, and parents/caregivers.

Rebecca Bosetti

rebecca.bosetti@uky.edu

Forager One Profile

Bio

Rebecca L. Bosetti, PhD, MSW is an Assistant Professor of Social Work and Criminal Justice at the University of Kentucky. Bosetti completed her BS in Psychology and Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh in 2015, her MSW at The Ohio State University in 2017, and her PhD in Social Work at The Ohio State University in 2020 after defending her dissertation entitled Maltreatment, Emotional Responses to Abuse, and Trauma Among Adolescents Engaging in Sexual or Non-Sexual Delinquency, which was funded by the Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse (ATSA) Pre-doctoral Research Grant. Dr. Bosetti’s research explores developmental antecedents to juvenile delinquency behaviors, the role of childhood maltreatment victimization and trauma in the etiology of adolescent offending, and emotional processing risk factors that differentiate youth who commit general delinquent offenses from youth who engage in sexually abusive behaviors. Moreover, her recent scholarship highlights the role of accessible, positive sex education as a tool for the primary prevention of sexual violence. Her study What’s Your Pleasure? Investigating Adult Toy Store Employees as Positive Community-Based Sex Educators received funding from the Spencer Foundation Small Research Grants on Education program, a highly competitive national funding mechanism. Dr. Bosetti serves on the editorial board of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, has been selected for the Research Leadership Strategic Planning Group for the international organization ATSA, and will continue researching the safety and victimization experiences of juvenile justice involved youth in the hopes of informing the implementation of developmentally responsive juvenile justice practices and effective educational resources for the primary prevention of sexual violence.

Current Projects

  • Evaluation Research with Juvenile Treatment Court
  • Research with community-based sex education
  • Research on incarcerated youth via secondary data

Victoria Collins

veco231@uky.edu

Forager One Profile

Bio

Victoria E. Collins is an Associate Professor, and Executive Director and Chair of Criminal Justice Programs in the College of Social Work at the University of Kentucky. Her research and teaching interests include space expansionism, state crime/crimes of the powerful, gender-based violence/violence against women, and the sociology/criminology of sport. Victoria has published several books, the most recent being Handbook on State Criminality (co-edited, Edward Elgar Publishing) Women’s Resistance in Global Context: Challenging Oppression and Inequality (Routledge), and Space Expansionism and Criminology: The emerging terrain of crime, harm, and violence (co-authored, Routledge). Some of Victoria’s recent publications have appeared in journals such as The British Journal of Criminology, The Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, Critical Criminology, and Critical Sociology.

Current Projects

  • Rural Fighting Sports: Gender, health, and geographies of exploitation in Appalachia
    • This study will employ a mixed method design to unpack the contemporary interpersonal and community-level impacts of the deep-rooted tradition of Appalachian fighting sports. Amateur fighting competitions, such as ‘Redneck Brawl’ and ‘Rough N Rowdy’, are sanctioned events that travel through Appalachia and surrounding states, soliciting local fighters (men and women), offering entertainment both regionally and nationally, and making considerable profit. The project objectives are twofold; (1) to examine the role of rurality and its relationship to gender, sport, violence, and health as they manifest in these competitions, gym spaces, and communities that support these events, and 2) to situate the meaning of the events and amateur sport more broadly, in the unique histories and geographies of Appalachia, a region that has oft been neglected and is subject to economic depression due to the flight of extractive industries. Drawing on content and visual analysis, semi-structured interviewing, and qualitative observational data, we propose to employ an interdisciplinary, mixed-method approach to understand the individual and community-level meaning and consequences of these events.

Laneshia Conner

laneshia.conner@uky.edu

Forager One Profile

Bio

Dr. Laneshia Conner is a health disparities social scientist with a research focus on reducing HIV risk among older Black women. She has leveraged significant internal and external training experiences to generate meaningful research products. Her primary research focuses on developing and testing culturally relevant sexual health programs and educational tools for aging communities and advancing health equity. Her goal is to improve HIV risk reduction efforts for older Black women. Her research and professional development have received both internal and external funding support, including support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and, most recently, a 5-year grant from the National Institute on Aging.

Dr. Conner’s scholarship also explores innovative teaching methods using horror films and critical pedagogy to engage students on social justice issues. Her secondary interests include how social work can and should support sports and athletics. She is deeply committed to community engagement, serving in multiple leadership roles and coaching youth and high school track teams.

Current Projects

  • Feasibility, Acceptability, and Preliminary Efficacy of an HIV Prevention Program
    for Older Black Women 8/22/2025-9/30/2030

    • In this mentored career development award, I plan to conduct a randomized, waitlist-controlled trial to test the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of the Woman-2-Woman intervention I developed.

  • TEK Faculty Fellows Program 8/1/25-12/31/26
    Transdisciplinary Educational approaches to advance Kentucky (TEK)

    • I developed a transdisciplinary course to engage students in exploring critical problems important to Kentucky and beyond. In partnership with CoSW faculty colleagues, we will pilot a new course that includes experiential learning in Washington, D.C. The research team will conduct pre- and post-assessments and publish with students on the outcomes of the course.

      *Data collection completed; currently analyzing data and writing manuscripts
      Humanities Pilot Grant Application

  • Advancing Gerontological Health Education Tools 5/1/25-5/1/26

    • This UNITE Humanities and Social Science Pilot Grant supported the collaboration of the College of Social Work and the College of Fine Arts to create a sexual health education tool for older adults and health professionals.

Stephanie Quiring

stephanie.quiring@uky.edu

Forager One Profile

Bio

Dr. Quiring has spent over 15 years as advocate, educator, and attorney across various stages of the criminal legal system. More specifically, working and advocating in spaces where a person experiencing mental health crisis intersects with the criminal legal system. Her legal practice focused on criminal defense with a subspecialty in advocating for clients where mental health issues were involved. Dr. Quiring joined the University of Kentucky College of Social Work as an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice in August 2025. Recent research has focused on the further development of state-level infrastructure for community-based mental health and substance use crisis response. For example, Dr. Quiring has completed social return on investment analyses in Indiana and Ohio – centering the lived experiences of people navigating recovery and the growing recovery communities supporting multiple paths of recovery.

Current Projects

  • Sequential Intercept Model (mental health/substance use across the criminal legal system) – building out the evaluation framework at the county-level

  • Peer run organizations – understanding the outcomes and impacts on recovery (micro/mezzo/macro)

  • Non-carceral crisis response in Kentucky

  • Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) – intersection of police power, parens patriae, and civil rights (law/legal based project)”