2025-26 Education & Health Research Hub Speaker Series
"Updates on CSSR Community-Engaged Projects with Fairfax County"
Friday, April 17, 2026 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM EDT
Online Location, Zoom Link in RSVP Confirmation
The CSSR Education & Health Research Hub aims to use this speaker series to leverage connections, spark multidisciplinary dialogue, and bring funded research opportunities to the university community and our community partners.
Join us as Amy Best, Elizangela Storelli and members of the FCEMP research team share "Updates on CSSR Community-Engaged Projects with Fairfax County".
Amy L. Best is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University, where she also serves as the director of the Center for Social Science Research. Her research focuses primarily on the study of social inequalities, with specific interest in how gender, race and class differently shape the social experiences of contemporary American youth. She has published widely on unequal schooling, youth and childhood well-being, marketization, as well as community-based health disparities and food insecurity, drawing heavily on cultural and interpretive perspectives in sociology. Best has been awarded grants from National Science Foundation, Corporation for National Community Service, and U.S Department of Education. She is author of Prom Night: Youth, Schools and Popular Culture (2000 Routledge), which was selected for the 2002 American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award, Fast Cars: Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars (NYU Press 2006), and editor of Representing Youth: Methodological Issues in Critical Youth Studies. (NYU Press, 2007). Her most recent book is Fast Food Kids: French Fries, Lunch Lines and Social Ties (NYU Press, 2017), which was selected for a 2018 Morris Rosenberg Award by the DC Sociological Society.
Best’s expertise is in qualitative and community-based approaches to social science research and has partnered with community-based non-profits and local government agencies in different research capacities. She has conducted program evaluation on farm-to-school and food education programs operating in public schools, as well as community-based interventions to address diet-related community health disparities, including mobile food markets and food voucher programs serving historically-marginalized communities in Washington D.C. and Northern Virginia. She is co-director of the Youth Research Council (YRC), a youth participatory action research program to improve equity in school. The YRC is a partnership of George Mason University’s Early Identification Program (EIP) and the Center for Social Science Research, in collaboration with local area school stakeholders.
Elizangela Storelli is Associate Professor of Sociology at George Mason University. She is also the director of the Sociology MA Program. She earned her MA in Sociology from American University with an emphasis on global sociology and her Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston College with emphases in aging and family studies. She was an instructor at Boston College before becoming an instructional faculty at GMU.
Storelli teaches a wide range of graduate and undergraduate methodological, substantive and introductory courses, and is engaged with graduate and undergraduate research projects, internship and practicum experiences, and student career development.
She also serves as research lead on several ongoing projects in partnership with local government agencies including Fairfax County Community Interventions to Promote Protective Factors for Older Adult Well-being and Fairfax County Neighborhood & Community Services: Protective Factors for Successful Aging. Storelli also serves as the co-primary investigator for the multi-year evaluation of Fairfax County’s Economic Mobility Pilot.
Members of the FCEMP Research Team:
Please RSVP by clicking on the "RSVP to this event" button above. We look forward to seeing you there.
