Author: Janice Berriault

Aimee Roberge, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, July 2022

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Aimee Roberge, Alumni Spotlight, July 2022Aimee 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

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Hilal KusculG. 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

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Associate Professor

Kari Adamsons, Faculty Spotlight, July 2022Dr. 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.

Diondra Brown, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, June 2022

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Diondra BrownDiondra Brown graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Human Development and Family Studies and Psychology in 2015. She desired to merge her academic areas of interest and pursued a master’s degree in Clinical Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania. While there, she studied evidenced-based therapy for children and families, in addition to conducting child-welfare policy research. During her time in graduate school, Diondra expanded her knowledge about family dynamics, trauma-informed treatment, and child development. Her field placements provided her with a wealth of experiences as she had opportunities to work in an early childhood learning academy, infant and child laboratory, residential treatment program, and outpatient mental health center.

Upon graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, Diondra worked as a child and family psychotherapist for several years with the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Her clinical work focused on play therapy, trauma therapy, and family therapy. Her clients’ diagnoses ranged from anxiety to attachment disorder. In addition to her clinical work, she pioneered the creation of a therapeutic preschool for 3- to 5-year-old children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder or early childhood trauma and co-facilitated a maternal stress group for mothers and their infants. Given her passion for learning, Diondra mentored several graduate students during her time as a therapist and served as an adjunct professor at Thomas Jefferson University in 2020.

During the same year, she began to transfer her knowledge and skills into the world of children’s media, by serving as a consultant for global children’s media companies. She also took on a part-time role with Common Sense Media, as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion reviewer for children’s picture books and television shows. She is currently the Child Development & Education Manager at Twin Cities PBS. She leads content creation and curriculum development for the station’s newest Ready to Learn grant project, which aims to enhance executive functioning skills and career readiness for children in kindergarten through second grade. In her spare time, she volunteers as an officer for the Children’s Media Association. Diondra believes that her academic pursuits at UConn provided her with the foundation she needed for future success, and the ability to pursue various career pathways.

Mackenzie Wink, HDFS Graduate Student Spotlight, June 2022

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Mackenzie Wink is a PhD candidate who joined the HDFS department in 2017 to work with Dr. Maria LaRusso. She earned her BS in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in 2016 and MA in HDFS from UConn in 2019. Mackenzie’s research interests largely focus on supporting the well-being of students and teachers in schools, primarily through Social Emotional Learning programs focused on building skills in awareness of the emotional experiences of oneself and others, relationship building, and self-regulation.

Mackenzie recently successfully defended her dissertation, which examined teachers’ social-emotional experiences in the classroom, such as their levels of compassion toward themselves, empathy toward their students, and experiences with job stress, to understand how these characteristics might impact their approaches toward behavior management. Findings illustrated that teachers’ well-being and empathy toward their students play an important role in their decisions for behavior management and interactions with the students in their classroom. Mackenzie hopes to continue this work within Social Emotional Learning interventions to shift from only teaching these skills to students, into a more a systematic approach for building social-emotional skills for everyone at school, including teachers and staff. Mackenzie also completed the graduate certificate in program evaluation and hopes to utilize those skills in this future work.

In addition to research, Mackenzie has had the privilege to independently teach or work as a teaching assistant for a number of undergraduate courses, including Research Methods, Infancy through Adolescence, Professional Communication, and Social and Community Influence on Children in the United States. Mackenzie also received recognition for excellence in teaching by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in 2021.

Mackenzie accepted a Postdoctoral Fellowship position with the Child Health and Development Institute to start over the summer. She is looking forward to continue toward supporting children’s mental health and social-emotional well-being through school-based programming in Connecticut!

Meg Galante-DeAngeles, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, June 2022

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Lecturer

Meg Galante-DeAngelisMeg Galante-DeAngelis retired June 1, 2022 after 49 years as a member of the UConn community. From her first step onto campus to retirement, the University offered Meg the opportunity to follow the most elusive and wonderful of all dreams – to make a difference in the lives of others. Learning together with her students as they developed their passion for supporting each child to flourish as an individual has been a life’s work worth having.  The question she often asks is, “What if everybody understood child development?”
Always more comfortable being a worker bee rather than the queen, Meg has tried to be the best member of the HDFS community that she could be. Her gratitude to her colleagues and students, past and present, is immeasurable. Her special thanks to the teachers and administrators, past and present, at the UConn Child Development Labs are twofold.  She will be sustained by the wonder of days spent at the Child Labs in the company of children and will cherish the life-lasting gift of being seen and loved as individuals still enjoyed by her five children, all proud graduates of the Child Development Labs. Would that every child had this opportunity.

During her time at UConn, Meg was involved with the Child Labs in many ways – as undergraduate and graduate student, observer, learner and worker, in Infant/Toddler and Preschool Master Teacher positions, as Assistant Director/Program Coordinator, and as Faculty Advisor. Two of her proudest memories are working with Charlotte Madison to get the teachers at the Child Labs unionized and to design the CDL Infant Center. Meg has loved working with the other Early Childhood faculty who share her commitment to children. She is particularly interested in teacher preparation, advocacy for equity and social justice, quality care and education for infants and toddlers, and supporting first generation college students. She has taught every UConn Early Childhood Development and Education course. She and her colleagues help students develop active engagement in daily reflection and mindfulness that support best practice while recognizing self-care practices.  Meg was recently recognized for her excellence by two awards: the HDFS Faculty Teaching Award and the UConn-AAUP – Career Teaching Excellence Award.

Meg’s career afforded her the opportunity to be around the amazing young people who choose Human Development and Family Sciences as their major. One of her favorite stories is about a student who, on an interview, was told, “You are like a unicorn. I did not know that people with the kind of early childhood training you have existed in the real world.” Well, they do exist and they are out there making a difference in the lives of children and families every day.

In retirement, Meg plans to enjoy beauty and quiet on an island off the coast of Maine punctuated by visits from her gregarious and growing family. She looks forward to volunteering in her local community, hiking, doing genealogical and historical research, and perfecting 18th and 19th century cooking and other period crafting techniques.