HDFS graduate student Abbey Horton received an APA Division 43 Student Travel Award due to her highly rated abstract to help offset the costs of attending the APA conference this August.
Author: Janice Berriault
Lisa Eaton receives CLAS 2022 Strategic Goal Award
Congratulations to Professor Lisa Eaton, winner of the CLAS 2022 Strategic Goal Award for Innovative Scholarship!
Rui Wu awarded UConn 2022 summer fellowship
Congratulations to graduate student Rui Wu, who was awarded a UConn 2022 Wood/Raith Gender Identity Living Trust summer fellowship!
Undergrad Sophie Lindsay earns two HDFS awards
Congratulations to undergraduate student Sophie Lindsay who earned two HDFS awards! Sophie worked for two years with the DASH project, the first year fully on WebEx before she met anyone in person. Sophie participated in a range of projects, held her own with a group of graduate students, trained and supported other students, and collaborated on multiple conference presentations, so has earned the Outstanding Involvement in HDFS Research award.
In addition to all of her research accomplishments, Sophie also supported the department as a member of the curriculum committee, and by volunteering her time at multiple departmental recruiting events, so has also earned the Outstanding Senior in HDFS award.
FS Undergrad Council hosts Social Sciences Career Night
On March 28th, the Family Sciences Undergraduate Council hosted a Social Sciences Career Night event. Ten career experts offered their time to 70 UConn students. The career experts included representatives from the fields of Marriage and Family (Emberleigh Luce, Jill Donohoue, Jennifer Anderson), advising (Kristin Van Ness ‘09 BA, ‘14 MA), entrepreneurship in real estate (Cheryl Hilton, ’91 HDFS), Early Childhood Education (Nancy Walsh), Career Development/Higher Education (Lisa Famularo), School Counseling (Wheeler Deangelis, ‘15), Social Work (Ashley Dyer ‘19), and the Juvenile Justine Judicial Branch (Catherine Foley, ’92 HDFS).
Many of the career experts that participated were UConn HDFS alumni—professionally, products the career experts have become widely recognized and accredited by the state of Connecticut, published novels, and have taught their own classes. Thanks to Ryan Watson, the faculty advisor, who helped the FSUC members organize the event!
Kate Kellet, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, May 2022
Ph.D ’13 HDFS
Dr. Kate Kellett graduated summa cum laude from Saint Joseph University with a bachelors in Psychology and received her masters in Human Development/Gerontology in 2003, also from Saint Joseph. The following year, her educational journey continued at UConn where she began doctoral studies in HDFS/Gerontology. During her doctoral studies, Dr. Kellett held numerous graduate assistantships, received a Summer Research Specialist Award, a Graduate School Summer Fellowship Award, and a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. She also received a Graduate Certificate in College Instruction at UConn under Dr. Keith Barker. Dr. Barker’s dedication to graduate students and to the improvement of the teaching faculty sparked Dr. Kellett’s interest in course development and classroom instruction at the college level and beyond. For several years, she taught at UConn Hartford and UConn Waterbury. Currently, she teaches Clinical Research Design and Qualitative Research Methods to Geriatric Medicine Fellows in the Academic Leadership program at the UConn School of Medicine where she helps train students for leadership careers in geriatric medicine.
In addition to teaching during her doctoral studies, Dr. Kellett worked as a Clinical Research Associate at the Braceland Center for Mental Health and Aging, Institute of Living/Hartford Hospital. While there, she collaborated with several psychiatrists, psychologists, and research scientists to conduct mental health research. One of her first study projects involved assisting the Newington, CT police department with a probe into possible explanations for numerous cases of self-immolation that had occurred within a short period. This research led to other studies involving people with mental and behavioral health disorders. Dr. Kellett has worked at UConn Health Center on Aging since 2005. She collaborates with researchers at UConn and other institutions who are dedicated to improving the health and well-being of people with disabilities, and older adults and their families. She manages various research project teams and contributes to all aspects of the research process in furthering disability and aging policy, clinical geriatric research and education projects.
During the past 18 years, Dr. Kellett has belonged to various workgroups committed to pooling the efforts of CT state agencies and non-profit partners to bring help and hope to people with significant needs. Workgroups include: The CT Workgroup on Challenging Behaviors; The CT Older Adult Behavioral Health Workgroup, and most recently the CT Housing Engagement and Support Services (CHESS) Workgroup, an effort to bring coordinated healthcare and housing services to people with mental health, substance use and other health conditions.
Over the years, Dr. Kellett has authored many legislative, public policy, and health policy reports with colleagues. Some of these include:
Connecticut’s No Wrong Door Business Case Development: Veterans Community Based Services Pilot and Program (2019-2021)
Navigating Dementia: LiveWell’s Dementia Capability Project to Build the Abilities of People Living with Dementia, their Care Partners and Communities (2019-2022)
CT State Unit on Aging: National Family Caregiver and Connecticut Statewide Respite Care Program—Assessment Report (2017)
Money Follows the Person Rebalancing Demonstration Evaluation (2013-2018)
Connecticut Bureau of Rehabilitative Services Needs Assessment (2010, 2013, 2022)
Connecticut Bureau of Rehabilitation Services and Mental Health Pilot (2011)
Medicaid Infrastructure Grant Evaluation (2006-2011)
In 2003, Dr. Kellett began serving on the Board of the South/South West Elderly Housing Corporation, in Hartford, CT and since 2007 has been President. The Board oversees a 36-unit complex that provides low-income housing to older adults and people with disabilities.
Dr. Kellett is a longtime resident of Farmington, CT where she and her husband raised three children. She continues to enjoy her family, including two grandsons, and can often be found in the garden or enjoying a walk on area trails.
Marlene Schwartz, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, May 2022
Professor
Marlene Schwartz is a Professor in HDFS and Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health. She grew up Columbia, Maryland and graduated from Haverford College in Pennsylvania with a BA in Psychology in 1988. After college she moved back to Maryland and worked for two years as an RA in Marion Radke-Yarrow’s lab at the National Institute of Mental Health.
In 1990, Marlene moved to New Haven to begin graduate school in Clinical Psychology at Yale. Her first two years, she worked with Edward Zigler and participated in the Bush Center for Child Development and Social Policy. In her third year, she began working with Kelly Brownell and shifted her focus to the clinical treatment of eating disorder and obesity. She completed her pre-doctoral clinical internship at the Substance Abuse Treatment Unit at the Yale School of Medicine.
In 1996, Brownell hired Marlene as the Co-Director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, where she provided treatment for adults and children, and supervised graduate student and post-doctoral trainees. In the early 2000’s, there was a notable increase in the number of children with obesity who were presenting at the clinic. Marlene delivered family-based obesity treatments, but increasingly felt like her efforts to help families were undermined by the unhealthy food environment. She saw the power of food marketing and the lack of healthy options in schools as significant obstacles for her patients and decided to shift her research focus to documenting the poor nutritional quality of children’s cereals, restaurant “children’s meals,” and school food. Concurrently, her own children were in preschool and elementary school, so she also got involved as a parent in trying to make changes in these settings.
In 2006, Kelly Brownell asked Marlene to be the Deputy Director as he founded the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. Marlene’s research focused on improving school nutrition environment. She collaborated with the Connecticut State Department of Education to assess school wellness policies and advocated for the 2006 law to remove beverage vending machines from schools. She developed an online Wellness School Assessment Tool (www.wellsat.org), which helps school districts comply with USDA regulations and has been used to code thousands of policies since 2010. Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative provided new opportunities to contribute to the national conversation, including a visit to the White House to celebrate the regulations that emerged from the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act.
In 2013, Marlene became the Director of the Rudd Center and in 2015, the Rudd Center moved to UConn to join InCHIP and set up offices in Hartford. Marlene joined HDFS where she teaches an undergraduate course, “Food and the American Family.” She continues to study school wellness policies and has expanded this work in collaboration with her Neag colleague, Sandy Chafouleas, to consider the whole child. She also has a second line of research on how to improve nutrition in the food banking system, which was inspired by her experience as a board member of the Connecticut Food Bank. Through this work she has developed an app that helps food bankers assess and track the nutritional quality of their inventory. Looking back, her favorite projects are ones that combine research, advocacy, and creating practical, data-driven tools for use in the field.
Edna Brown, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, April 2022
Associate Professor
Dr. Edna Brown has a background in developmental psychology, sociology, and social work with an interdisciplinary approach to research. She earned a Joint Doctorate in Developmental Psychology and Social Work from the University of Michigan. During her graduate career, she engaged in research endeavors at the Institute for Social Research and was a member of the Life Course Development Program and the Program for Research on Black Americans.
Dr. Brown’s research focuses on the impact of stressful life transitions on health and wellbeing during middle and later adulthood. Coping with relationship breakups and coping with illness are two major life transitions that affect a large percentage of our adult population. Using life course theories, she examines how social contexts (i.e., gender, social class, family configurations, social relations) and cultural contexts (i.e., race, ethnicity, religion), affect coping, health, and wellbeing during normative and non-normative life transitions, particularly among Black Americans. These social and cultural contexts provide meaning and substance for interpreting research findings. Dr. Brown also considers the factors that influence Black Americans’ health promoting behaviors and the development of health promoting interventions to reduce health disparities. An interdisciplinary theoretical framework permits her to provide practical implications that address societal concerns. She has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and presented at many national and international scholarly conferences on health and aging. Several of her publications and conference presentation were co-authored by graduate students. Dr. Brown is a fierce advocate for graduate students and has enjoyed including them in her research endeavors.
Dr. Brown’s interest in aging and health was further inspired when she and her son lived in Accra, Ghana in West Africa. She worked for the United Nations HelpAge Ghana project providing health, housing, and employment services for older adults across Ghana. While there she had the opportunity to visit several West African regions and quickly recognized many of the cultural traditions practiced among Black Americans. The similarities provided her an insight into the historical contexts and reasons for many of the traditions and how they were modified to promote healthy development among Black Americans.
Dr. Brown’s teaching incorporates her knowledge and passion about culture and diversity and about healthy aging. She has taught Diversity in HDFS every semester since 2007 and frequently teaches Adulthood and Aging. These classes help students to open their minds to the diversity among them, dispel negative stereotypes about people unlike themselves, and recognize that development continues past adolescence.
Dr. Brown has served her professional community in several ways. She served on the University’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion Advisory Committee, the Vice Provost COVID-Focused Work Balance Task Force, and the General Education Oversight Committee (GEOC) Content Area 4 Diversity and Multiculturalism. She is a faculty affiliate and serves on the advisory Boards of Africana Institute. Dr. Brown has served as a peer reviewer for several academic journals and conferences, and has been invited to serve on the editorial board for the Journal of Marriage and Family. One of her most challenging but rewarding roles was as Associate Department Head for Graduate Studies. The position gave her an opportunity to sensitively serve and mentor graduate students as they were making critical decisions about their professional development.
Dr. Brown has served her home community in various positions. From 2014-2017 she was appointed to the African American Affairs Commission by Connecticut House Majority Leader Joseph Aresimowicz. The committee served as advisors to CT policy makers about the unmet needs of African American constituents. She also served on the Board of Directors for Rockville Public Library, Vernon-Rockville CT from 2014-2018.
When not working, Edna enjoys strength training, walking, spinning, and dancing. She loved travelling to Caribbean, Central and South American countries to learn about different cultures, traditions, foods, and indigenous religions.
As of June 2022 Edna, will retire from UConn to enjoy traveling again. Another retirement goal is to work with elementary school children in underfunded public schools in vulnerable neighborhoods in her hometown, New York City. She hopes to expose these students to higher education opportunities beginning at a young age.
Elizabeth (Beth) Wilke, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, April 2022
BA ’15 HDFS
Elizabeth (Beth) Wilke graduated from UConn in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in Human Development and Family Studies, concentrating in Early Childhood Development and Education. She received the State of Connecticut Office of Early Childhood’s Early Childhood Teacher Credential (ECTC) after completing Fieldwork & Supervised Teaching Practicums in UConn Child Labs’ Preschool 2 and Infant Blue Room.
Upon graduation from UConn, Beth attended Bay Path University in Massachusetts for two years and received a master’s degree in occupational therapy. She briefly strayed from her early childhood roots during her fieldwork experiences as an occupational therapy student, completing one fieldwork experience with the geriatric population and another with school-age children. Although she was not working with young children during this time, her undergraduate training as an early childhood educator was critical to her success as an occupational therapy student. During this time, she discovered that the concepts of developmentally appropriate practice and reflective practice were invaluable even outside the field of early childhood.
Beth returned to the early childhood field shortly after receiving her master’s degree; she accepted her first position as an occupational therapist at an autism-specialty program for the Connecticut Birth to Three System. Although the demands of a therapist’s first job typically elicit much anxiety, Beth found that she adjusted to the field of early intervention relatively seamlessly. She credits much of her initial success in the field to her training and experiences at the UConn Child Labs. The experience of creating developmentally appropriate curricula for children of varying ages, as well as building and maintaining rapport with children and families, created solid foundations for her future work in early intervention.
After almost two years at an autism-specialty Birth to Three program, Beth accepted a new position at a general program that serves children and families of children with a variety of needs. She frequently works with infants and toddlers who were born prematurely, are experiencing delays in their feeding and/or motor development, as well as those on the autism spectrum. Her professional interests include early signs of autism, particularly the potential association between early motor delays and later diagnoses of autism. To further her development in the early childhood/early intervention field, she is currently training to administer autism assessments such as the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS), and TELE-ASD-PEDS, a tool to support the identification of autism via remote assessment. She is also enrolled in an interdisciplinary training course for early interventionists at UConn’s Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities Education, Research and Service to enhance her skills building capacity in parents and caregivers of young children.
Beth recently purchased her own condo in Farmington, Connecticut, where she lives with her cat and dog. Outside of work and school, she spends time with friends and family members that live locally. Her hobbies include cycling, swimming, and yoga. She recently started trying to grow houseplants and is a big fan of Taylor Swift!
Samantha Lawrence, M.A., HDFS Grad Student Spotlight, April 2022
Samantha (Sam) Lawrence is a Ph.D. candidate dedicated to the study of identity-based stigma and health among LGBTQ+ individuals, folks with high body weight, and individuals with intersecting marginalized identities. She conducts quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research related to these interests at the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Health with her doctoral advisor, Dr. Rebecca Puhl. Sam also collaborates on projects in the DASH and SHINE labs, under the mentorship of Drs. Eva Lefkowitz, Kay Simon, Lisa Eaton, and Ryan Watson, related to LGBTQ+ young people’s interpersonal relationships, experiences of stigma, and overall well-being.
Sam recently successfully defended her dissertation on weight communication and stigma in the family context. She conducted three studies using three different participant samples—including a multinational sample—and mixed methodologies. Collectively, findings from these studies underscore the prevalence and ramifications of family-based weight stigma in six Western countries, especially from members of one’s immediate family (e.g., mother, romantic partner), and highlight the myriad qualitatively distinct forms family-based weight stigma can take (e.g., teasing, passive aggressive remarks, social exclusion). These findings highlight the need for weight stigma reduction efforts and public health messaging campaigns to target family relationships, helping family members to reduce their internalized weight bias and engage in more supportive, rather than stigmatizing, communication about weight-related health with their loved ones.
In addition to honing her research skills while at UConn, Sam has had the privilege of mentoring more than a dozen undergraduate research assistants and Honors students and teaching several HDFS courses, including Research Methods in Human Development, Diversity Issues in HDFS, and Adolescent Development. In recognition of her commitment to mentorship and teaching, she received the 2019 Outstanding Instructor in Human Development and Family Sciences Award, the 2020 University Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award from the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and the 2020 Mentorship Excellence Award from the Office of Undergraduate Research.
Sam is incredibly excited for her professional next steps. This summer, she’ll be joining Dr. Marla Eisenberg and her team as a post-doctoral research scholar at the University of Minnesota in the Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health. As part of Dr. Eisenberg’s mixed-methods Protection at the Intersection for Queer Teens of Color (PIQ-TOC) study, Sam’s research will focus on the health and experiences of LGBTQ+ adolescents with multiple marginalized social positions.
Outside of her work, Sam enjoys distance running (she completed 3 marathons and a trail ultramarathon in her time as a graduate student), hiking, Peloton workouts, practicing French, tending to her house plants, and—most of all—spending time with her loved ones.