The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $400,000 grant to Tulane University economist Patrick Button to study discrimination in access to mental health care for LGBTQ+ people and marginalized communities and whether the problem has been exacerbated by the pandemic.
The five-year funding award is part of the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, the NSF’s most prestigious awards supporting early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Button’s project will also explore discrimination against under-represented groups when applying for mortgages, develop new analytical tools for economics research using text data and establish a mentoring program for under-represented graduate and undergraduate students in economics.