To Thrive and Flourish

The newest academic center within the Baylor University College of Arts & Sciences has a distinctively different approach to seeking out new knowledge about the ways humans think, feel and act.

Dr. Sarah Schnitker, an associate professor of psychology and a recognized leader in virtue development research, wants her research to focus on how humans thrive and flourish. The vast majority academic research focuses on how to “fix” people and their problems –– such as mental illness, disease or any number of disorders that they might be facing. Although addressing problems is essential, Schnitker believes it is also important to study what goes right and how to help people live out their potential.

That desire to see people do better led Schnitker to found and become the first director of the Baylor Research in Growth and Human Thriving Science (BRIGHTS) Center, which publicly launched on October 16, 2023. 

“This is about how can we partner with humanities scholars and use scientific methods to study age-old questions such as, ‘What is a good life, and how do we cultivate it?,’” she said. 

Schnitker said she and her fellow researchers in the BRIGHTS Center want to rely on “hypothesis testing” and “replicability” in their work “to supplement the long-standing traditions of scholarly argumentation, logic, textual analysis and historical analysis in philosophy, religion and theology. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to bring data to bear on delineating what promotes thriving among actual humans on the ground,” she said.

There are numerous reasons that research into human thriving is important, Schnitker said.

“Look around our society and in other societies,” she said. “Not everyone is thriving. People are languishing. They’re full-on suffering. There are some things we know we’re just not implementing as a culture. But modern life presents unique challenges to thriving for humans, and we believe that Baylor University is well-situated to address these.”

Interdisciplinary approach

Schnitker joined Baylor in 2018 after serving for eight years on the faculty of Fuller Seminary’s School of Psychology. She holds a Ph.D. and master’s in personality and social psychology from the University of California, Davis, and a bachelor’s in psychology from Grove City College. Schnitker met some “really wonderful people all across campus” after getting to Baylor, and then realized there weren’t many systems in place that allowed for interdisciplinary work. She and her colleagues soon made an effort to change that.

“It started as a grassroots effort,” she said. “Some of the psychologists I know, we started meeting and inviting different folks we were connecting with over campus, and that grew into a weekly colloquium that we just kept inviting people to. And then we viewed that colloquium as, ‘Oh, let’s write grants together –– we could do really cool things if we had resources.’ And so it just snowballed.”

The BRIGHTS Center makes use of a significant amount of lab space in the Baylor Science Building, where the staff of the Center is housed. In addition to Schnitker, that includes associate director Lizzy Davis, grant coordinator Kathryn Aughtry and grant manager Kinsley Whitworth, as well as a variety of postbaccalaureate staff, postdoctoral fellows and research scientists.

The colloquium, which evolved out of Schnitker simply meeting with other interested faculty members, now meets twice a month as an officially sponsored event of the BRIGHTS Center. And it’s not limited to Baylor faculty.

“Especially for the graduate students and postdocs, we’ve really made it a space where anyone on campus is welcome,” Schnitker said. “A lot of our grad students or postdocs want to get interdisciplinary training, but only a few of our programs really have that built into their training models, so it’s a fun way for them to connect with faculty across the institution.”

Significant grant funding

In 2018, Schnitker and Davis began working together on a $2.6 million grant they received to research character interventions in adolescents. Initially working only with other psychologists, their circle “grew to include theologians, religious scholars, philosophers, sociologists and more,” Davis said. “Now, we have a colloquium consisting of individuals from all over campus, 60-plus members and more than 18 different academic units and campus departments represented.”

Since 2018, Schnitker and her team have brought in more than $12 million in grant funding. 

Dr. Devan Stahl, associate professor of religion, and Schnitker are the co-principal investigators on a project called Illuminating Theological Inquiry and Christian Ethics Through Training in Psychological Science, which earned a $2.5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation early in 2023.

“I had never worked with Templeton in the past,” said Stahl, who studies bioethics and disability ethics. “Sarah and Lizzy were seasoned veterans with Templeton. They helped me to better understand the process of writing a Templeton grant as well as how to reach out to program officers. I am fairly certain I would not have received this grant without their help.”

Putting theory into practice

To provide practical ways to address the topics they study, Schnitker said that it’s critical that researchers work alongside practitioners who are engaged with “members of communities, to help ensure that research can actually be useful for practice more seamlessly than has traditionally been done in the academy.”

One area in which Schnitker and others are putting that theory into practice looks at how character is formed in college students. She is the co-principal investigator –– along with Dr. Perry Glanzer, professor of educational leadership in the Baylor School of Education, and Dr. Karen Melton, associate professor of human sciences and design in the Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences –– on The Role of Meta-Identity in Developing Moral Communities Within Higher Education, which brought in a research grant of nearly $2.7 million, again from the John Templeton Foundation. 

“We are looking at Christian and secular higher education as a context for forming young people and their character as a specific component of thriving that’s essential –– that is not just feeling happy yourself, but also forming people morally,” Schnitker said. “It’s essential to examine the type of development that forms people who contribute to their communities, and essential that their own well-being doesn’t undermine that of other people.”

To achieve this goal, their grant involves a “massive quantitative and qualitative data collection effort” from students at Baylor, Notre Dame, Wheaton and other universities with either Christian study centers or Catholic institutes for Christian thought, Schnitker said. 

“As we do the research, we’re also producing resources for the leaders of these centers for Christian thought on how they could tweak their programs to help cultivate virtues and character strengths in their students that they interact with in their programming,” she said.

Student research opportunities

The BRIGHTS Center offers interdisciplinary research opportunities not only for faculty members across campus, but also for students and trainees at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels. 

Schnitker said in her home department of psychology, and in most other science departments at Baylor, from six to 20 undergraduate students are involved in research labs. Those students, working alongside faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, “learn how research is done by getting hands-on experience and sometimes even publishing with faculty,” she said.

And while it’s sometime unusual for undergraduate students to be involved with research at some institutions, that’s not the case at Baylor. 

“Baylor really leads out in involving our undergraduates in our research,” Schnitker said, “especially in our science departments, where we really involve the undergraduates in legitimate research that is grant funded, that actually leads to publications, and allows for undergrads to engage independent projects. They are very involved, and that’s distinctive about Baylor. That is not the case at a lot of R1 institutions. That ranking we have of top undergraduate research experiences in US News and World Report is well earned.”

Some of the grants that researchers at the BRIGHTS Center have been awarded include funds for assistantships that allow graduate students to spend more time on research and less time serving as teaching assistants. 

As for the postdocs (professionals doing research after earning their doctoral degrees), Schnitker said the Center has some “who are pretty involved because their own intellectual interests have this crossover interdisciplinary component, even if that’s not what their faculty member spends their time on.”

*This story originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Baylor Arts & Sciences magazine.

ABOUT THE COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES AT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY 

The College of Arts & Sciences is Baylor University’s largest academic division, consisting of 25 academic departments in the sciences, humanities, fine arts and social sciences, as well as 11 academic centers and institutes. The more than 5,000 courses taught in the College span topics from art and theatre to religion, philosophy, sociology and the natural sciences. The College’s undergraduate Unified Core Curriculum, which routinely receives top grades in national assessments, emphasizes a liberal education characterized by critical thinking, communication, civic engagement and Christian commitment. Arts & Sciences faculty conduct research around the world, and research on the undergraduate and graduate level is prevalent throughout all disciplines. Visit the College of Arts & Sciences website.