Accomplishing Our Mission Through
Research & Evaluation
Our R&E team is here to help guide you in making data-driven, informed decisions to effectively meet your goals.
Welcome!
Leveraging Research to Empower Change
As a research center of Penn State Behrend, we have access to world class faculty and resources that allows us to perform both basic and applied research within schools and the community. Our R&E team specializes in all aspects of program evaluation – we are here to help guide your team in making data-driven informed decisions to effectively meet your goals.
Research Areas of Expertise:
Our faculty conducts basic and applied research within the fields of clinical, developmental, and social psychology, in addition to education and sociology.
- Risk and protective factors for youth
- Bullying
- Social determinants of health
- Growth mindset
- Empathy
- Prevention and intervention research
- Trauma-informed and strength-based approaches
Evaluation Services Provided:
We are trained to provide support and consultation for your project or service. We collect, analyze, and interpret data, and share findings with your team so you can make data-driven decisions about your programming.
- Grant writing
- Evaluation plans
- Logic model development
- Survey design
- Focus groups
- Quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis
- Written reports for different audiences
Clinton Faupel, Executive Director of RemedyLive
Our Partners
United Way
Erie’s Public Schools
UnifiedErie
Erie Community Foundation
Erie Insurance
Megan E. LaMotte, Ph.D.
Associate Director of Research & Evaluation
Dr. Megan LaMotte is a social psychologist who joined the Penn State Behrend faculty and was appointed as the Associate Director of Research and Evaluation at CORE in 2024. She grew up 4 hours southeast of Behrend in Danville, PA and earned her bachelor's degree in psychology and women/gender studies from the University of Delaware in 2015. For three years between undergraduate and graduate school, she worked at Geisinger Health System’s Obesity Institute, a clinic-based research center aimed at reducing obesity and its comorbidities. This was an invaluable experience: getting to be a part of a robust applied research team involved in everything from pharmaceutical trials to biobanking and behavioral interventions. Dr. LaMotte then began graduate school at the University of Nevada, Reno to pursue her interests in social psychology. There, she strengthened her methodological toolkit, studying advanced statistics and research methods. Her topical expertise includes the social patterning of mental health by way of the stress process. In other words, how our social statuses (e.g., our race, gender, and class) influence our exposure to stressors, how we cope, and the consequences to our well-being. To CORE, Dr. LaMotte brings a passion for research that shines light on how society can increase equity in well-being.