PhD Student Rina Friedberg Honored with 2018 Lozoff Award

In May, the late Marjorie Morse Lozoff’s family and friends gathered to meet and celebrate PhD student Rina Friedberg, who was honored with the 2018 Marjorie Lozoff Award for Research on Women and Gender. This annual award is given to a Stanford graduate student conducting research related to Lozoff’s interests of furthering women’s development. This prize honors the memory of Marjorie Lozoff, who served as a model for the idea that most deeply absorbed her: furthering women's development for the benefit of women, men, children, and society. 

Friedberg, who is enrolled in Stanford’s Statistics PhD program, advances Lozoff’s legacy in her contributions to the advancement of women and society broadly. Friedberg has a longstanding track-record of volunteering for and teaching in sexual violence prevention groups. In fact, she entered her PhD program so that she would be able to contribute positively to the world. 

With a continued interest in public health and gender-based violence prevention, Frieberg is now working on an ambitious and far-reaching research project. Friedberg and an interdisciplinary team of Stanford researchers are implementing and evaluating a female empowerment program in the informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya. Their goal is to reduce rates of sexual assault and intimate partner violence. 

Friedberg was nominated for the award by Professor Mike Baiocchi, faculty in the Stanford Prevention Research Center and Clayman Institute Faculty Research Fellow.  Baiocchi also attended the lunch to meet the Lozoff family and friends, and recognized Friedberg’s impact: “It cannot be overstated the contribution that Rina has made to elevating the level of data analysis the team is doing.” Baiocchi and colleague Clea Sarnquist, senior research scholar at the Stanford Global Health Program in the department of pediatrics, presented their initial research findings during the Clayman Institute’s symposium “Breaking the Culture of Sexual Assault.” 

With the funds from the award, Friedberg has plans to visit Nairobi in the fall, when she will present her work and pilot a new study. She said that receiving the Lozoff award will “open up doors for my work and…become the launching pad for a wealth of research.”

Of the Lozoff Award celebration, Friedberg wrote “I left genuinely inspired by Marjorie Lozoff and by everyone I was lucky enough to meet at that lunch. Their insightful questions will stay with me as I proceed in this work, and their warmth and kindness made the prize personal and even more meaningful.”