Author: Janice Berriault

Tianmei Zhu, HDFS Graduate Student Spotlight, December 2023

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Tianmei ZhuTianmei is a first-year PhD student working with Dr. Kari Adamsons. Originally from China, she first became a student in the US as a double major in Economics and Psychology at Smith College. At Smith, she worked with Dr. Marsha Kline Pruett and Dr. Patricia DiBartolo and dived into two research areas: coparenting and perfectionism of women of color in academia. These seemingly distant research areas both spoke to her identity and interests, which proved academic pursuits could be a thrilling rollercoaster. Before entering the world of HDFS field or even deciding to pursue a PhD, Tianmei completed several internships to try to escape from academia by meandering through various industries, from big PR firms to financial security companies, wire and phone corporations, and children’s clinics. Eventually, she gave up and admitted family is a constant theme that intrigues her. Encouraged by her undergrad mentor, she took a leap of faith into this amazing field, and she hasn’t looked back since.

Tianmei’s current research is driven by two core passions. In one role, she is now working on parenthood-related research with Dr. Adamsons and hoping to discover more about how parents perceive, negotiate, and practice their coparenting strategies. In the other role, she is working with Dr. Charles Super on the cross-cultural comparison of parental ethnotheories. She loves both topics and enjoys pushing herself to move forward like a determined snail. The small team and big lab settings bring her equally fantastic research experiences.

When she’s not buried in her class or research work, she likes hanging out with friends, playing video games, and trying out all kinds of recipes with all kinds of music played by her lovely Bose bar. Her favorite games are Zelda BOTW and Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney. She has both a PS5 and a Nintendo Switch stationed at home, most of the time serving as a final save point of her everyday life.

Lenette Azzi-Lessing, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, December 2023

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Lenette Azzi-LessingAfter 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.

Rachel Tambling, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, December 2023

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Rachel TamblingDr. Rachel Tambling is a Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Connecticut, a licensed marital and family therapist, a Clinical Fellow of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and an AAMFT Approved Supervisor of clinical behavioral health services. She received her MA in Marriage and Family Therapy from Western Michigan University and PhD in Child and Family Development with a concentration in Marriage and Family Therapy from University of Georgia.

Dr. Tambling’s research is focused on modifiable factors related to behavioral health service engagement. She is interested in research that explores ways to address barriers to behavioral health equity, including expanding the availability of couple and family therapy, and understanding the complex components of effective engagement and change during therapy. Dr. Tambling is also interested in the measurement of psychotherapeutic constructs and the ways in which measurement impacts outcomes of behavioral health services.

More broadly, her work is based on a Systems Theory approach, which highlights the complex and interacting effects (e.g., individual, familial, social structural, policy, societal) that influence well-being and behavioral health outcomes. Her research includes an examination of the ways in which societal factors, including stigma, social determinants of health, and access to services impact mental health and substance use treatment services. Dr. Tambling is committed to research that explores the complex components of effective engagement and clinical change using ecologically valid and rigorously collected data that are analyzed using advanced and appropriate statistical techniques. Her work has been cited over 2,000 times; she co-authored a top cited paper in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, the flagship journal of the marriage and family therapy profession, and has seen her work published in the preeminent journals of systemic scholarship (e.g. Contemporary Family Therapy; Family Process; Family Relations) and international journals of behavioral health and substance use (e.g. Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly; Couple and Family Psychology; Family and Community Health; Health Education and Behavior; International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction; Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, Policy).

Dr. Tambling is the Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Family Therapy, a premiere journal in the field of marriage and family therapy, and an author of the textbook Helping Skills: Basic Techniques for the Active and Engaged Helper (Cognella, 2023).

At UConn, Dr. Tambling serves as the Chair of the Institutional Review Board at the University of Connecticut and is an Affiliate of the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy, a Research Affiliate of the Center for Applied Research in Human Development, and an Affiliate of the Sustainable Global Cities Initiative.

Dr. Tambling has been recently honored with several awards. She is a 2022 recipient of the Western Michigan University Outstanding Alumnae Award for contributions to the fields of counseling, psychotherapy, and marriage and family therapy. She is also the NCFR Family Therapy Section’s 2023 Kathleen Briggs Outstanding Mentor Awardee, an award in recognition of her work in mentoring and supporting the next generation of scholars.

In her life outside of work, Dr. Tambling is an avid runner and enjoys travel, marathons, and travel to marathons.

Jolaade Kalinowski leads community event on Black Women’s Health

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Jolaade KalinowskiOn October 25th, UConn Stamford hosted a community event entitled, “A Community Conversation About Black Women’s Health.” This event was led by Jolaade Kalinowski in concert with staff at the Stamford Department of Health and Stamford mayor’s office. They hosted a panel discussion featuring 4 Black women doctors who practice medicine/dentistry in Stamford, followed by a community Q&A. The event was well attended by community members, community-based organizations, and Caroline Simmons (mayor of Stamford). In total, 72 people attended the event, which included a dinner catered by a Black woman owned business in Stamford. The organizers received excellent feedback from attendees and plan on continuing to engage the local and greater Stamford community in the future.

Audrey Boucher, HDFS Undergraduate Spotlight, November 2023

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Audrey Boucher- HDFS Undergraduate SPOTLIGHT, Nov 2023Audrey Boucher is a UConn junior majoring in HDFS. She is from Newton, Massachusetts and is very passionate about the UConn HDFS program. Audrey is very driven and motivated about working with others.

Audrey currently serves as the treasurer of the Family Sciences Undergraduate Council and is excited to be a part of a very thoughtful group of students with similar career interests and goals. In Fall 2022, she was a UConn First Year Experience (FYE) Mentor. In this role, she led a weekly class with first year students and provided students with resources. Her goal was to make each student feel welcome and comfortable as a new Husky! Audrey hopes to study abroad in Italy in Spring 2024 as an opportunity to take classes and immerse herself in a new culture. After graduation, Audrey is interested in pursuing a career in marriage and family therapy. She hopes to complete her masters in Social Work at UConn or find a program in the Boston area.

Audrey is really excited to see what the future holds. In her free time, Audrey enjoys spending time with her family and friends, going to Cape Cod to spend countless hours on the beach, and speaking/learning Italian. She is also a huge Boston Bruins fan. You also can always find her with a strong cup of coffee in her hand!

Sara K. Johnson, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, November 2023

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Sara K. JohnsonSara 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.

Delaina Carlson, HDFS Graduate Student Spotlight, November 2023

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Delaina CarlsonDelaina Carlson is a first-year Ph.D. student working with Dr. Rachel Chazan Cohen. Originally from Pennsylvania, she earned her bachelor’s degree in Applied Developmental Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. During this time, through research, internships, and work experience, she gained a love of working with infants and toddlers, along with their families. Over time, she has gained experience in child care, child care management, home visiting, early intervention, community organization, and research.

Most recently, Delaina worked for Dartmouth College in the Media and Health Behaviors Laboratory. Here she developed an interest in public health/nutrition messaging, mindfulness, and children’s media and health behaviors, including sleep, physical activity, and eating behaviors.

Her career has taken a winding path, but her ongoing mission is to support children and families. She hopes her experiences working with a variety of families across multiple settings will inform her future research. Specifically, she seeks to better understand individual and environmental factors that influence child development, family functioning, and health and wellness. Additionally, she plans to study the existing systems that support families, including child care, home visiting, and other interventions.

When not working, Delaina prefers to be outside with her husband. She loves to travel, hike, ski, garden, mountain bike, and rock climb. When inside, Delaina enjoys picking up new hobbies, whether it’s pottery, board games, or yoga.

Anne Berset, HDFS Graduate Student Spotlight, November 2023

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Anne BersetAnne Berset is a first year Ph.D. student working with Dr. Preston Britner. Anne is originally from Northern Virginia just outside of Washington D.C. She attended the University of Denver for her undergraduate degree, where she worked as a research assistant in the Child Health and Development lab with Dr. Sarah Enos Watamura. Anne’s first experiences in the lab were on a project led by Dr. Watamura and her graduate student, Elly Miles, examining risk and protective factors for Iraqi and Syrian refugee caregivers who had resettled in the Denver area. During her time at University of Denver, Anne received several research grants to conduct a mixed-methods study examining a parent psychoeducational program designed to help parents manage stress and trauma. Anne then completed her senior thesis using cross-sectional data from the Buffering Environmental Stress Together (BEST) project in Dr. Watamura’s lab. In her thesis she examined the role of social support in mental health among diverse Early Head Start families who had experienced adversity. This work differentiated between informal support (i.e., friends, family) and formal support (i.e., government aid) to understand which type of support was associated with reduced depression and anxiety in caregivers following a history of childhood adversity. In addition to her research activities, Anne worked as a tutor in the Learning Effectiveness Program at the University of Denver, where she tutored undergraduate and graduate students with neurodevelopmental disabilities in Psychology and English.

After graduating from the University of Denver, Anne moved to Cincinnati, OH where she worked as a Clinical Research Coordinator with Dr. Bill Brinkman at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. While in this role, Anne gained experience working with clinical populations in community and school-based settings by serving as the lead coordinator on several NIH-funded randomized controlled trials. Some of the projects she managed examined parent and adolescent decision-making about ADHD treatment and management as well as genomic testing.

Anne’s interest in working with adversity-exposed populations and designing accessible community-based interventions led her to the UConn HDFS program, where she hopes to continue researching the biopsychosocial consequences of trauma among minoritized groups and developing interventions that improve mental health outcomes. Anne is working with Dr. Preston Britner on a project examining higher-education outcomes among youth with a history of foster care. She is also a graduate research assistant on projects with Dr. Kevin Ferreira van Leer and Dr. Beth Russell.

When she’s not in school, Anne spends her time hanging out with her three cats (Tuxedo, Mione, and Sonny). Anne loves to read, hike, and watch dystopian and sci-fi movies. You will likely find her playing pool at a billiards hall when she’s not studying.