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-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?”
Congratulations to graduate student Sydney Klein, winner of the Student Athlete Success Program (SASP) 2022 Recognition of Excellence Award for going above and beyond in her role as SASP Mentor. She was nominated for the award by student athletes and SASP staff.
Congratulations to Associate Professor Laura Donorfio, winner of the 2022 Clark Tibbitts Award from the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) and the Academy for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE). This award is given to an individual or organization that has made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of gerontology and/or geriatrics education.
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.
Congratulations to Professor Lisa Eaton, winner of the 
Congratulations to graduate student Rui Wu, who was awarded a UConn 2022 Wood/Raith Gender Identity Living Trust summer fellowship!