Associate Professor Ryan Watson was quoted in an article about anti-trans legislation and its effects on mental health of LGBTQ+ youth. Read the article here.
Author: Janice Berriault
Rebecca Puhl featured in a podcast on size discrimination
Professor Rebecca Puhl was featured in a podcast on size discrimination. Listen to the podcast here.
Laura Mauldin’s op-ed essay published in The American Prospect
Associate Professor Laura Mauldin published an op-ed essay in The American Prospect “The care crisis isn’t what you think”. Read the essay here.
Ronald Rohner featured in UConn Today
Emeritus Professor Ron Rohner was featured in UConn Today for an article on parental rejection across cultures. Read the article here.
HDFS welcomes Cindy Stewart, Educational Program Administrator
Cindy Stewart grew up in South Windsor, Connecticut, but she ventured up to University of Maine for her bachelors and master’s degrees. She earned a B.A. in Zoology while enjoying a variety of extracurricular activities such as flamenco dancing and axe throwing. In her last semester, she conducted marine biology research on an NSF grant. Somewhere in an obscure journal issue from long ago is an article about Batesian mimicry in nudibranchs on which she was probably the seventh author. She learned a great deal about sea slugs and also that she didn’t want to do marine biology research as a career.
After a year working at Eastern Mountain Sports and getting great deals on camping and hiking gear, Cindy returned to the University of Maine to earn her Master of Education in college student development. She funded this endeavor by graduate assistant positions as a residence hall director and community organizer. Thus began her career in student affairs and several more positions in residence life at SUNY Cortland and UMaine plus serving as director of new student programs and orientation. In her time in student affairs work she experienced a major fire on the top floor of her residence hall, an epic oatmeal fight in the basement, and all kinds of antics in between.
A move to the Boston area resulted in finding a job that straddled student and academic affairs, working as assistant director at the Experimental College at Tufts University. There Cindy recruited professionals from the greater Boston area to teach courses in their realm of expertise for Tufts undergraduate students. She did everything from print and digital marketing to office management to instructor orientation, plus taught a film studies course for a group of junior and senior undergraduates who in turn taught courses on film-related topics for first-year student advising groups. One of her proudest achievements was a multi-year series of monthly events for faculty to share their current research with a lay audience of students, staff, and faculty from across the university as well as members of the local community.
Another move, this time back to Connecticut, brought Cindy to UConn in 2013. A UConn women’s basketball fan since her teens, she was excited to be a part of Husky Nation as a program assistant and then program coordinator in the Department of Communication. She is very excited to be joining HDFS as program administrator and looks forward to meeting everyone!
Kristina Sluzewski-Soderholm, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, January 2022
Kristina Sluzewski-Soderholm graduated from UConn in 2013 with a double major in Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS) and Psychology. After graduation, Kristina completed her M.Ed in Family and Consumer Sciences Education at North Dakota State University and soon after began her professional career as a high school teacher and preschool program director. In 2015, Kristina began a position at Wilton High School to run their Child and Lifespan Development program, where she oversees their collaborative high school-preschool program.
Over the past seven years, Kristina has taken her passions for early childhood development and secondary education to create an environment for her high school students where they can build connections and gain hands-on experience working with preschool aged children. Her preschool program, Helping Hands Preschool, is located inside the high school building and allows her students to work daily with the preschool class. Her main goal as an educator is to inspire her students and create a safe space for them to explore, learn, and grow without judgement.
Kristina’s passion for child development has led her to run several groups at her school, aiming to show her students the importance of volunteer work and giving back to the community. Some of the groups’ accomplishments include running a supply drive for requested items in the foster care system, raising awareness within the community of childhood cancers, and collecting funds to send children with serious illnesses to summer camp free of charge. Within the past seven years, she and her Wilton students have raised thousands of dollars to donate to childhood causes in their community.
Kristina has remained closely connected to UConn since graduating. In 2019, she was recognized at the 2018-2019 UConn ECE Professional Development Awards as the Rookie of the Year for Excellence in First-Year Course Instruction for successfully introducing the UConn Individual and Family Development course into the Wilton High School curriculum. To continue to connect her high school students to the university, Kristina often takes her high school students on field trips to the Storrs campus to show them all the opportunities that the HDFS department has to offer for students interested in the field. Kristina credits the UConn HDFS department for opening her eyes up to a career path that makes her excited to come to work every day.
Carla Gomez retires after more than 20 years with UConn HDFS
CONGRATULATIONS to CARLA GOMEZ who retired in December 2021, after more than 20 years at UConn HDFS!
Carla joined the School of Family Studies in 2000 for a 10 day temporary position that turned into more than two decades of work. Carla earned her bachelors degree in Physical Education from Central Connecticut State University. Prior to working at UConn, she held positions at Coventry High School as a physical education teacher, Charter Hospital of Tampa Bay in Florida as the Director of Activity Therapy, and worked in the Willington Public Schools.
In the School of Family Studies, which subsequently became the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, and later, the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, Carla held a range of different positions. Most recently, she served as the HDFS Educational Program Administrator for a number of years. Carla served as the face of the department, often the first person that future faculty and students met when visiting the department. In this role, she supported students, staff, faculty, and alumni in every imaginable task. Her responsibilities were wide ranging, including budgets, staffing, HR and payroll, hiring, merit and PTR, building and space management, departmental lectures and events, and countless other things (including loaning out staplers, directing lost students in hallways, and helping faculty from other departments set up equipment in classrooms down the hall). To quote Professor Emeritus Steve Wisensale, Carla is “the best of the best.”
Carla’s plans for retirement include traveling – including a long awaited trip to Vancouver to see her son – as well as volunteering, biking in the summer and snowshoeing in the winter! She will be greatly missed within the HDFS department, but the HDFS students, staff, and faculty know how much she has earned this next stage, and wishes for her an empty inbox and no more frazzled last minute requests from colleagues.
Nathaniel Stekler, HDFS Graduate Student Spotlight, January 2022
Nathaniel Stekler received his Bachelor of Science degree in psychology from Union College (NY) in 2020 with a minor in philosophy. He graduated with departmental honors, summa cum laude, and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Nathaniel also won the John Lewis March Prize, awarded to a senior who has shown increased interest and ability in psychology during the final two years of college.
Nathaniel joined UConn’s HDFS graduate program in 2021 to work with Dr. Preston Britner, with an interest in early attachments and how adverse childhood experiences can moderate associations of early attachments with personality, emotions, relationships, and worldviews. In addition, he is interested in how adverse environments such as homelessness negatively affect the attachment relationship. He also wants to work to develop interventions and policies that address the impact of adverse childhood experiences on the attachment relationship.
At Union, Nathaniel worked with Dr. Joshua Hart on his senior thesis, examining how personality affects political viewpoints. Specifically, he studied how narcissism affected people’s support for Trump’s immigration policy and ultimately support for Trump himself. Nathaniel presented this research at the 2020 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference. Later, Nathaniel and Dr. Hart published this work in The Journal of Social Psychology.
After Nathaniel graduated, he volunteered at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in Dr. Sarah Lamer’s lab. He assisted in selecting articles and coding verb framing in sentences and images on the topic of sexual assault. Nathaniel continues to collaborate with Dr. Lamer on work that addresses sexual assault stereotypes in the United States.
In addition to volunteering at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, in the year after graduation Nathaniel assisted Dr. Preston Britner and Julie Brisson in a recently submitted systematic review and meta-analysis on the association between adverse childhood experiences and allostatic load across the lifespan.
In his free time, Nathaniel enjoys skiing and hiking. He has a goal of skiing down Mt. Washington and hiking all 48 of the 4,000 ft. peaks in the White Mountains by the end of next year.
Annamaria Csizmadia, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, January 2022
Associate Professor
Annamaria Csizmadia is a scholar-teacher of cultural diversity. She has spent the past two decades studying how culturally relevant and group-specific factors shape developmental processes among monoracial and Multiracial (including immigrant) youth of color. She investigates how youth of color develop a positive ethnic-racial identity and the role that families play in helping youth navigate life in a racialized society where access to resources and opportunities is determined based on one’s race (as well as class and gender). She has a special interest in Multiracial youth development (in part because she is the proud mother of a wonderfully brilliant Multiracial daughter).
Her work is Informed by cultural ecological, critical race, and intersectional theories. In this research she highlights the important role of family ethnic-racial socialization, such as how parents teach children pride in their race, ethnicity, and culture, and help them cope with bias and discrimination. Her research demonstrates that these socialization practices along with other culture-specific parenting behaviors contribute to social-emotional adjustment among youth of color in important ways. She also has found that how parents identify their child’s race is a highly salient form of ethnic-racial socialization in families of Multiracial youth. Her theoretical and empirical work emphasizes the dynamic interaction of family socialization, Multiracial youth’s social cognition, and their social environment that shapes Multiracial youth development.
Alongside family practices and youth’s identity-related social cognition, Annamaria seeks to understand how influences outside the family shape development in monoracial and Multiracial youth. Some of her most recent work focused on learning about racial microaggressions. In 2019-2020, as part of the UConn Racial Microaggression Study research team, she surveyed over 1,200 UConn students of color to learn about their experiences with racial microaggressions in and outside the classroom. The team found that students who reported more interpersonal experiences that communicated to them invalidation, insult, or derogatory messages due to their racial group also reported lower levels of psychological well-being and more discrimination-related trauma symptoms. The team presented their research to the University administration and disseminated it through campus news and the Hartford Courant to inform policy change and the community.
Annamaria began developing a keen interest in cultural diversity when she started taking Russian and German languages as an elementary-school student in Hungary where she was born and raised. Speaking other languages besides her native tongue exposed her to all kinds of cross-cultural experiences. She learned about life in different cultural settings from pen pals from Eastern and Western Europe (prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain!), summer camps that hosted students from Austria to Korea, and school trips abroad. Her informal learning through travel and cross-cultural exchange in time shifted to formalized learning about linguistics, culture, literature, and, in the end, diversity issues in human development. She did not only traverse cultures and national borders, but eventually also disciplinary boundaries. After studying “Germanistik” and “Anglistik (German for German and English literature and linguistics) at the University of Trier, followed by a master’s degree in German Literature, in 2008 she completed her Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Missouri.
In addition to her research, Annamaria feels privileged to learn about cultural diversity through daily interactions with her students at the UConn Stamford campus where she teaches courses on diversity issues, intergroup relations, research methods, and other HDFS topics. As a scholar-teacher, she regularly engages students in her research. Over the years, she has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries with her students and taken them to national conferences to present their work.
For her teaching excellence and commitment to student success, Annamaria has received several honors and awards, including the 2013-2014 Honors Mentor of the Year Award, 2019-2020 Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Teaching Fellow Award, and the 2020 College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award. Although these recognitions mean a lot to Annamaria, she is most proud of her students who secured competitive funding to do their research under her mentorship and went on to pursue graduate training at UConn, Harvard, and many other prestigious universities. As a first-generation college student and immigrant, herself, providing access to opportunities and resources for her students, many of whom are also first-generation college students and of immigrant backgrounds, is the most fulfilling part of her job!
Annamaria also serves her professional community as an editorial board member of the Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Family Psychology, and Journal of Research on Adolescence, and as a peer reviewer for two dozen journals, ad hoc conferences, and funding agencies. As member of the board, advisory council, and now Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee, she has been supporting the work of the Stamford Public Education Foundation, a local educational non-profit since 2008.
Outside work, Annamaria loves traveling, reading, running long distances, Barre and HITT workouts, doing puzzles, home renovation, gardening, and spending time with her daughter, family, and friends. She lives in Stamford, CT where she feels right at home given that over 35% of the city’s population is foreign born.
Rebecca Puhl featured in multiple news outlets
Professor Rebecca Puhl was featured in multiple news outlets for her work on weight discrimination and stigma:
Strong Support for Laws Against Weight Discrimination, Bullying in Medscape (read the article here); Women Feel More Stigma from ‘Spare Tire’ Around Middle Than Men, US News (read the article here); The Public Welcomes Policies Prohibiting Weight Discrimination, Clinical Advisor (read the article here); The Pandemic is Changing the Way Young People Eat and How They Feel About Their Bodies: 4 Essential Reads, Herald Review (read the article here).