Beth was promoted to Professor effective August, 2024!
Beth Russell has spent 20 years studying psychological distress and how people manage it. Her studies examine how individuals and families respond to stress across a range of typical life events (like the transition to parenthood) and atypical experiences (caregiving in the context of chronic health conditions). Her most recent work examines the multi-level influences that shape people’s responses to stress, spanning individual, social, and place-based factors over time. She is currently on several teams funded by both internal and external awards to develop and test interventions that target the regulation of distress to improve psychosocial outcomes.
Families are a primary source of support during times of stress. Much of the modeling close loved ones provide about how to manage challenges is shaped by attitudes about stress and the coping behaviors that might (or might not) be useful in a given situation. The range of supports to cope with stress extend far beyond family influences to include informal supports like friends/peers, and formal supports including help-seeking through treatment providers. Beth’s work across different stressful situations demonstrates that there are subgroup patterns in help-seeking which ultimately impact coping strategies. For example, young men tend to be strikingly absent from clinical trials and community-based service provision, indicating meaningful gaps in our understanding of help-seeking in times of stress. Describing the unique distress and resilience trajectories among subgroups at heightened risk for mental health struggles is an important step in tailoring accessible and equitable interventions for those with the greatest needs. Beth and her HDFS colleague Kari Adamsons won the National Council on Family Relations 2024 Men in Families Focus Group Best Research Paper Award for their coauthored work “Longitudinal transmission of risk behaviors between mothers, fathers, and adolescents” published in the Journal of Family Psychology.
Beth became the Director of the Center for Applied Research in Human Development (CARHD) in 2018, where she has over a decade of experience directing evaluations of human service programs that provide supports to disadvantaged communities, helping programs identify what works best for whom within their client populations. Beth also holds two editorial board member seats for the journals New Directions for Evaluation and Child Psychiatry and Human Development.
Outside of work, Beth spends time with her family, in her gardens and art studio, and connecting with friends over good food. Three generations of her family love coming together from around the country to travel to the best beaches, jungles, waterfalls, and caves every summer – next up in 2025: SCUBA diving a Pacific Island volcano crater!
Sarah Rendón-García collaborated and is featured in the short-form documentary “Invisible Wounds: Unveiling Migration Trauma.” Directed by Oscar Guerra, an Associate Professor of Film and Video Production at UConn, this documentary recently premiered on PBS. You can watch it here (
Graduate student Vanessa Esquivel (mentee of Caitlin Lombardi), received the 2024 Early Care and Education Research Scholars: Head Start Dissertation Grant from the OPRE of ACF to support her dissertation research, Investigating Parent-provider Relationships In Early Head Start Among Latine Families: An Integrative Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods Study. She is the first UConn student to be awarded this highly competitive federal grant, which will support her work of building a comprehensive understanding of parent-provider relationships among Latine families and informing future policy and program efforts of Early Head Start and the broader field of Early Care and Education. This is a two-year award totaling $50,000. Congratulations Vanessa!
Tanika Eaves Simpson (PhD 2018) recently returned from a six month research visit to Australia, funded by the Fulbright Global Scholars program to study perinatal health practices of indigenous and BIPOC individuals and families. She also recently received a promotion to associate professor of Social Work at Fairfield University. Learn more here: 
John Oliver recently cited a study that Professor Marlene Schwartz co-authored on the “Last Week Tonight” segment about school lunches. Watch the video here 
Taylor Maag, a 2013 graduate with a BA in Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS), has built a successful career in education and workforce policy, driven by her passion for ensuring that every learner and worker, regardless of their background, has access to economic opportunity. Taylor credits her HDFS education for providing a strong foundation in child welfare, family dynamics, and social policy, which fueled her passion for direct service and advocacy work.
Lily Gorman is a first-year PhD student in the HDFS program. She specializes in Adulthood, Aging, and Gerontology and hopes to research familial caregiving and end-of-life decisions under advisor Dr. Laura Donorfio.