Congratulations to Assistant Professor Jolaade Kalinowski, who was recently selected as a recipient of the Pre-K Scholar Career Development Program Award.
Author: Janice Berriault
Na Zhang receives grant to design mindfulness training module
UConn Today wrote an article about Assistant Professor Na Zhang’s new NIMH career development grant. Read the article here.
Kim Gans’ research featured in UConn Today
Professor Kim Gans was featured in UConn Today discussing meals and physical activity for children in family child care homes. Read the article here.
Laura Donorfio receives award read the article in UConn Today
Associate Professor Laura Donorfio was featured in UConn Today highlighting both her honor of receiving the Clark Tibbitts Award and for her work research project on drag expression. Read the article here.
Aimee Roberge, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, July 2022
Aimee Roberge grew up in Connecticut, attended UConn from 2010-2014 and graduated with a double major in Human Development and Family Studies and Human Rights. During her time at UConn, she volunteered and participated in many clubs and activities including Habitat for Humanity, Love 146, Alzheimer’s Association and Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society. She also studied abroad in Cape Town, South Africa. One of her favorite HDFS memories is assisting a professor with coding therapy session recordings using the Rapid Marital Interaction Coding Manual for clinical observation data.
Upon graduation, Aimee participated in a summer program called LeaderworX, where she helped to facilitate community service projects for middle and high school students and planned group discussions and activities to educate youth about community service and social justice. After taking some time to reflect on her time at UConn and spending time with some little kiddos at her neighbor’s day care, Aimee made a big move to the Big Apple for a volunteer program with Covenant House, a shelter for youth experiencing homelessness, where she worked with mothers and children. She worked at Covenant House for another year before returning to school at Baruch College to receive her Master of Public Administration degree. Her capstone project focused on an analysis of policies, practices, and nonprofit programs that impact children and their incarcerated mothers in New York State prison and city jail facilities. Aimee spent time in Washington D.C. during one of her semesters taking classes and interning, so decided to move there upon graduation.
In D.C, Aimee worked with the National Community Action Partnership for three years as a Program Associate with the Learning Communities Resource Center team and then as a Senior Associate for Learning and Dissemination. She helped to write multiple grant applications and manage virtual and in-person learning cohorts to provide training and technical assistance to a network of over 1000 Community Action Agencies in areas such as comprehensive services for children and families, equity, trauma-informed care, financial empowerment, and homelessness intervention.
Aimee recently transitioned to a new position with the Council for Exceptional Children as a Professional Development and Resources Coordinator. She enjoys living in Virginia and in her free time likes to spend time by the water, go on hikes, or curl up with a good movie or book. While life can get busy and there are so many opportunities and options available, Aimee tries to embody one of her new mantras: “people over plans:” don’t live life only by your to-do list or you will miss a lot right in front of you. Make time for a few things that are really important, then let life’s beauty and adventure unfold!
Hilal Kuscul, HDFS Grad Student Spotlight, July 2022
G. Hilal Kuscul is a family and human development scholar whose research centers around the dynamics of low-income family environments and their influences on children and parents, particularly fathers. She studies the contextual factors that influence fathering and the effects of fathering behaviors on children. During her doctoral study at UConn, she worked with Dr. Adamsons, gaining experience in working with secondary data through projects using the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study and the Turkish Fathers Project. Her work is theoretically driven, primarily using bioecological and identity theory and framed by gender roles and cross-cultural perspectives. She strongly supports research-based policies and practice and uses her research to inform family-based prevention and intervention programs that promote resilience and wellbeing in parents and children.
In addition to research, Hilal embraces teaching as a central privilege of her career. In her previous professional life, she had a rich experience teaching and mentoring adult learners in the nonprofit sector. She also received a college teaching certificate while at UConn to have a deeper grasp of teaching college students. In addition to teaching HDFS classes, she also worked as both program coordinator and facilitator for the Parenting Apart: Strategies for Successful Co-Parenting program, a state-certified program for divorcing parents coordinated by UConn’s Center for Applied Research in Human Development.
Hilal expects to finish her doctoral degree in the Summer of 2022 and will be a visiting assistant professor of Human Development at the State University of New York in Oswego in the 2022-2023 academic year. This experience will provide her with new opportunities in teaching.
Hilal likes to spend time with her husband, her college-aged sons, and friends. She loves to read books on ancient history and visit museums.
Kari Adamsons, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, July 2022
Associate Professor
Dr. Kari Adamsons came to UConn 15 years ago, in 2007, following a journey that was anything but straightforward. Her first two years of undergraduate were as an international relations major with a specialization in Russian foreign policy (which has come in dismayingly handy in the last few years), but in her last two years she switched tracks and ultimately earned a BA in psychology. She then moved to North Carolina, ostensibly to work for a year and gain in-state residency before going back to graduate school in “something psychology-ish,” but instead she spent 6 years working as a paralegal for an insurance defense law firm. She eventually dropped back to working part-time at the law firm while getting her masters in HDFS at University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), with a plan to DFSwork with non-profit agencies. However, during her master’s program, she tried working with non-profit agencies and discovered it was not for her, and so she continued on to get her PhD in HDFS UNCG. After 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, and she cannot imagine a profession that would suit her better. Her favorite parts of her job are that there are so many different parts to her job, making it difficult to burn out on any single one. She loves the energy involved in teaching and mentoring, both graduate and undergraduate, 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 that 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, a new 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 arose from experiences she had in college. At the time, Kari was interested in the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect, and her experiences included an internship with the Washington DC law office responsible for assessing and advocating for children’s “best interests” in cases where abused children had been or were going to be removed from their homes. That experience led her to a local children’s advocacy organization, who requested research on whether fathers influenced children’s outcomes and should, therefore, be included in their abuse prevention efforts (which had previously and exclusively focused on mothers); spoiler alert, the answer (which might seem obvious now, but was relatively unknown at the time) was yes, they do, and yes, they should. Carrying that experience into graduate school, Kari noticed that in virtually every class about parents and families, all of the research talked about “parents,” but all of the samples focused only on mothers. Unwilling to simply accept these gaps in our understanding of families, she has spent the last 20 years working to contribute to our knowledge of the varied and important ways fathers influence children and families. Kari also is fascinated by family theories and methodologies, and especially the ways that the theoretical lens or methodology we employ influence our findings as well as our interpretation of those results. In that vein, she has published several theoretical papers, a textbook on family theories, and is co-editor of the upcoming Sourcebook of Family Theories and Methodologies (due out this summer).
When she’s not working, Kari enjoys relaxing with her husband at their home, located on just under 20 acres in Columbia, CT, and playing with the family pets, which currently include 2 dogs, 12 chickens, and 5 rats. She’s a rabid fan of the Washington Capitals, Dallas Cowboys, Boston Red Sox, and UConn basketball (women’s and men’s), and also enjoys watching golf and tennis, and she enjoys watching them all the more so because she is skilled at exactly zero of those sports herself.
Marlene Schwartz discusses school meals in UConn Today
Professor Marlene Schwartz discusses school meals in UConn Today.
Alum Rona Karasik receives Hiram J. Friedsam Mentorship Award
HDFS Alum Rona Karasik (MA, ’89), Professor at St. Cloud State University, is the recipient of the Hiram J. Friedsam Mentorship Award, which recognizes individuals who have contributed to gerontological and/or geriatrics education through excellence in mentorship to students, faculty, and administrators.