Kari was promoted to Professor effective August, 2025!
Dr. Kari Adamsons came to UConn 18 years ago, in 2007, following a fairly winding journey. She spent her first two years of college as an international relations major with a specialization in Russian foreign policy (which continues to come in dismayingly handy in recent years). However, she soon realized that although international politics are fascinating, that was something she’d rather learn about as a hobby than pursue as a career. Instead, she switched tracks and obtained a BA in psychology. She then moved to North Carolina and spent six years working as a paralegal for an insurance defense law firm. She eventually dropped back to working part-time at the law firm and pursued her Master’s in HDFS at University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), with a plan to DFSwork with non-profit agencies. However, after an internship with a non-profit during her Master’s program, she realized that also was not the career for her (too much bureaucracy!). Research, however, seemed pretty interesting, so she left the law firm and went back to school full time to get her PhD in HDFS at UNCG. After graduating and completing a one-year post-doctoral fellowship with UNCG’s Center for Youth, Family, and Community Partnerships, she joined UConn as an Assistant Professor of HDFS. Now a Professor, her favorite part of the job is that there are so many different parts to her job. She loves the energy involved in teaching and mentoring, and then recharging by hiding in her office and analyzing data, intermingled with occasional community trainings and applied work to remind her why she studies the things she does.
Broadly speaking, Kari studies fathers, which has allowed her to dabble in a number of different content areas; by simply adding the phrase “with fathers” to any subject, any area is open for exploration! To date, she has examined subjects such as the development and expression of fathering identities during the transition to parenthood, fathers’ influence on child obesity, nonresident fathering and shared parenting following divorce (and recently, during COVID), and most recently, the processes involved in the transmission of risk behaviors such as substance use between fathers and adolescent children. Her passion for understanding and including fathers dates back to an independent study in college. At the time, Kari was interested in child abuse prevention, and a local children’s advocacy organization requested research on whether fathers influenced children’s outcomes and should, therefore, be included in their abuse prevention efforts (then exclusively focused on mothers). Spoiler alert: the answer was yes, they do, and yes, they should. Carrying that experience into graduate school, Kari noticed that in every class about parents and families, the research talked about “parents,” but the samples only included mothers, meaning little was known about fathers. Kari has spent her career trying to answer all of those unanswered questions. Kari also is fascinated by theories and methodologies, and especially the ways that our theoretical lens or methodology not only influences our interpretation of our results, but often shapes the results themselves.
When she’s not working, Kari enjoys relaxing at home in the woods of Columbia, CT, with her husband, Jim, and the family pets. Those pets currently include 2 English Setters and 3 aquariums, but have, at various times, also included numerous pet chickens and rats. She’s a fanatic about the Washington Capitals, Dallas Cowboys, Boston Red Sox, and UConn basketball (women’s and men’s), and she also enjoys watching golf and tennis. She enjoys watching them precisely because she is skilled at exactly zero of those sports herself. When not watching sports, she is probably catching a show at either Hartford Stage or the Bushnell Theater, particularly if a Broadway production is in town.