Michael knew at a young age he wanted to work to create greater access and opportunity to corporate America for individuals from underrepresented groups. Through his previous work with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of Connecticut and their various Diversity and Inclusion training programs, Michael saw the importance of creating spaces of belonging and inclusion for all. While at UConn, Michael was able to engage in classes that taught the sociological and anthropological components of Human Development in underrepresented communities that became the backbone of his career in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

While at UConn, Michael was active with UConn Hillel, the ADL, and the Puerto Rican and Latin American Cultural Center. In his senior year, Michael secured an internship in Diversity & Inclusion at the Phoenix Wealth Management Company in Hartford. Upon graduating from UConn in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in HDFS, Michael was able to leverage his degree and his internship at the Phoenix to land a job as a Diversity & Inclusion Coordinator at ESPN where he helped to build ESPN’s D&I programs from the ground up. Michael helped launch various employee resource groups, ran the Women’s Leadership Development Program and various hiring, mentoring, and retention initiatives for the company.

Michael has maintained a focus on building greater inclusion and equitable systems within large companies like MassMutual, EY, and Aetna. Today, Michael leads Global DEI efforts for the Marketing organization at Google. Michael’s focus is to ensure leaders are held accountable for real change; Google Marketing builds a team that looks like its users and fosters belonging for all; and builds a body of work that challenges the status quo. Michael also holds an Executive Masters in Human Resource Management from Cornell (‘17) and serves on the Board of Directors for UConn Hillel and the ADCOLOR organization.

After graduating in 1996 with a PhD in HDFS, Lenette Azzi-Lessing continued her leadership as Executive Director of Children’s Friend, a child-and-family-serving organization in Rhode Island. She and her team built a broad range of services to meet the needs of marginalized children and families, particularly those in poverty. During her time there they developed one of the nation’s first programs for child-welfare-involved families affected by parental substance use and Rhode Island’s first comprehensive family support center. Under Dr. Azzi-Lessing’s leadership, Children’s Friend also pioneered an organizational equity and inclusion initiative to support its antiracist, anti-oppressive approach to service delivery.

In 2007, Dr. Azzi-Lessing left agency work to accept a faculty position in the Master of Social Work (MSW) program at Wheelock College in Boston, where she became a tenured, full professor. She founded Wheelock’s Graduate Certificate Program in Early Childhood Mental Health and served as faculty leader of Wheelock’s partnership with the University of Fort Hare (UFH) in South Africa to promote the wellbeing of young children and their families. Her work with UFH included co-conducting a community assessment and co-developing a Graduate Certificate Program in Early Childhood Development and Family Support in the South African Context.

In 2018, Dr. Azzi-Lessing joined Boston University (BU) School of Social Work. She serves as department chair and coordinator of the school’s Specialization in Children, Youth, and Families. Building on her relationships with the South African early childhood development community, Dr. Azzi-Lessing initiated a partnership between BU and the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town, focused on preventing violence against young children in South Africa and other low-and-middle-income countries. This work engages experts from the Global South, including community members with lived experience, to identify effective violence-prevention strategies.

Dr. Azzi-Lessing is a Senior Fellow at the Child Welfare League of America and a founding member of its Research Equity Committee. She is the author of numerous publications, including the book, “Behind from the Start: How America’s War on the Poor is Harming Our Most Vulnerable Children.”

Dr. Azzi-Lessing notes that her learning at UConn School of Family Studies (now HDFS) was the ideal complement to her social work education, enabling her to leverage a deep understanding of child and family development in fighting the systemic inequities that threaten the life chances of millions of children in the U.S. and globally.

Sara K. Johnson received a Master’s in HDFS from UConn in 2008; in 2012 she received her Ph.D. in HDFS as well as a Graduate Certificate in College Instruction and a Certificate in Quantitative Research Methods. She was drawn to the program because of its individualized nature, reflected in the variety of experiences she had during her time at UConn. For instance, she served as the Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Primary Prevention (now the Journal of Prevention), a graduate research assistant at Center for Applied Research in Human Development, a teaching assistant for the HDFS Undergraduate Honors Program, and an instructor of record for several courses. For her dissertation research, she partnered with UConn’s Office of Community Outreach to conduct a study of how service-learning experiences might promote undergraduate students’ civic attitudes and identity development.

After graduating, Sara became a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Applied Research in Youth Development at Tufts University under the mentorship of Dr. Richard Lerner. She was promoted to Research Assistant Professor in 2013 and held that position until 2016, when she began a new position at Tufts as Assistant Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. Sara received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in July 2023. Since 2021, she has also served as the Director of Graduate Studies in her department, where she oversees both the Master’s and Doctoral Programs.

Sara’s research group is called the Development of Identity and Community Engagement (DICE) Lab. At DICE, she works with undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral level research assistants to continue pursuing the interests she developed while at UConn. As an applied developmental scientist and methodologist, her research emphasizes understanding how young people become involved in the world beyond themselves and how to research these processes in ways that promote equity and methodological rigor. Her substantive scholarship considers variation in how young people think about contribution and in what they do, and shows how different individual and contextual factors relate to these ideologies and actions. Sara’s methodological work includes developing new measurement techniques and illustrating how to identify subgroups of participants within a dataset. Finally, her work addresses the systemically unequal and inequitable contexts in which young people live by investigating how we can measure and promote young people’s involvement in equity-focused contribution.

Sara is an active member of several professional societies, including the International Society for Research on Identity (where she served as Conference Committee Chair from 2017 to 2021) and the Society for Research on Adolescence. She serves on the editorial boards of several journals (including the Journal of Research on Adolescence and the Journal of Youth and Adolescence), as a Statistical Consulting Editor for Child Development, and as Associate Editor of the Methods and Measures section of Applied Developmental Science.

Sara and her husband live in Somerville, Massachusetts. They are temporarily cat-less but plan to adopt two new feline family members soon. In their spare time, they enjoy reading on their porch, exploring the natural environment around their neighborhood, and traveling.