Check out the recent UConn Today article on the regional campuses, which highlights the addition of the Early Childhood Specializations at UConn Waterbury! Read the article here https://today.uconn.edu/2024/08/uconns-regional-campuses-gear-up-for-exciting-new-academic-year/
Author: Janice Berriault
Rebecca Puhl’s work featured in Rudd/CSCH brief
Professor Rebecca Puhl’s work on reducing weight stigma was recently featured in a research brief by the Collabatory on School and Child Health. Read the article here https://csch.media.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2206/2024/08/Rudd-CSCH-Brief-Reducing-Weight-Stigma-Families-August-2024.pdf
Paige Desjardins, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, September 2024
Paige Desjardins graduated from UConn in 2013 with a B.A. in HDFS with a focus on Early Childhood Education. Learning through first-hand experiences at the university’s Child Labs, Paige left school with a deep understanding of Child Development and the importance of instilling positive values in the lives of young children. She went on to work at Natural Learning Children’s Community School in Simsbury, Connecticut where she was head teacher of their preschool room, breaking the typical four walls of the classroom by taking her students out onto hiking trails and into the school’s gardens and composting units. Paige started sharing her curriculums online under the handle Natural Learning Kids, which slowly gained a following as she was promoted to Curriculum Coordinator at NLCCS.
After four years and 20,000+ followers, Paige decided to quit her teaching job and move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in children’s media. While nannying for high profile families and obtaining her Master’s Degree in Early Childhood Education, Paige volunteered with the Children’s Media Association, a networking group whose purpose is to connect people within the industry. She ran their social media pages and eventually became their Director of Marketing while starting to get freelance education consulting work on animated preschool scripts. Paige landed her first real role in the industry as a Coordinator on Disney Junior’s Educational Resource Group, providing educational notes for outlines and scripts on all of Disney Junior’s properties as well as testing shows in the form of storybooks at schools around Los Angeles.
Paige used this script coverage experience as fuel to take screenwriting classes and pursue a career in children’s animation writing. She moved into a production role on Disney Junior’s Alice’s Wonderland Bakery and worked her way into an Associate Writer role by its second season. Paige is currently a staff writer on Disney Junior’s Mickey Mouse Funhouse and spends her free time volunteering on the board of Black Thumb Farm, a nonprofit brining gardening opportunities to kids around East Los Angeles as well as playing flag football with her friends.
Sarah Rendón García , HDFS Faculty Spotlight, September 2024
Dr. Sarah Rendón García joined the HDFS faculty as an Assistant Professor in August 2023 and began teaching in HDFS in fall 2024. Born in Venezuela to Colombian parents, migration has been an integral part of her story from the very beginning. Her childhood unfolded across three countries, each contributing to her multicultural lens. At age 9, she and her family settled in Norwalk, Connecticut—a place she now calls home.
Growing up as an undocumented young person profoundly shaped Sarah’s perspective. It fueled her unwavering commitment to working with immigrant communities. Her journey led her to delve into developmental psychology through diverse avenues: children’s television media, youth development, youth organizing, and early childhood intervention. Before pursuing her Ph.D. at Harvard University, Sarah worked with Child First—an evidence-based program focused on buffering toxic stress through positive caregiver-child relationships. Her educational journey includes an Ed.M. in Prevention Science and Practice from HGSE and a BA in Psychology and French from the College of the Holy Cross.
Sarah’s research focuses on mixed-status immigrant families originating from Latin America. She explores how both children and adults grapple with the implications of being undocumented in the United States. Caregivers and kids alike contribute to her empirical insights—whether independently, within caregiver-child dyads, or as a family unit. Generously funded by the NSF, Ford Foundation, and NAEd/Spencer Foundation Fellowships, her work sheds light on these complex, often overlooked experiences. Her approach is interdisciplinary, practical, and community-centered. She seeks to amplify voices, consider geographical contexts, and navigate sociopolitical ecologies—all while advancing our understanding of these individuals’ lives.
After the academic cap comes off, Sarah spends her days balancing family life, taking care of her two little ones and a sizable Bernedoodle with her husband. In her elusive free time, Sarah enjoys watercolor painting, tackling DIY projects, and watching TV series that make her shriek and laugh.
Elise Sumsion, HDFS Graduate Spotlight, September 2024
Elise is a first-year PhD student working with Dr. Eva Lefkowitz. She grew up in Seattle, but moved to Utah to attend Brigham Young University (BYU). At BYU, Elise graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in Human Development and minor in Global Women’s Studies. At BYU, she worked as a head teaching assistant for several courses, including human development and gender development, where she developed a love for studying gender and sexuality across childhood and adolescence. Working with Dr. Adam Rogers and his research team on Project ADEPT (Advancing the Development of Emotional Proficiencies in Teens), Elise completed her minor capstone studying the relationship dynamics of parents and their sexual-minority teens. She presented this project and two other projects focused on gender issues at the Mary Lou Fulton Conference held by BYU. Through her teaching and research experience at BYU, she developed a passion for both practices that fueled her desire to pursue further education and eventually become a professor.
At UConn, Elise aims to further study how children and adolescents understand and express gender and sexuality throughout their development. Specifically, she wants to investigate the influence that parents and families have on their children’s understanding of these concepts. She is fascinated by the intersection of family life and social development: how parents and families help shape their kids’ perceptions of social norms and roles. Through studying these topics, Elise hopes to translate research into practice by providing parents with guidance on how to better communicate about gender and sexuality with their kids in a healthy, inclusive, and accepting manner.
Although she aims to teach at the university level, Elise loves working directly with infants and children. For two years, she volunteered at Family Haven in the crisis nursery and helped provide children of all ages with respite care. Over the summer, she also worked at a childcare center as a teacher with infants aged 6-12 months. While she loved learning about child development in the classroom, she found it even more insightful to witness the immense growth and personality development made at this age in such a short time.
Rong Huang new Asst Prof position at Austin Peay State University
Congratulations to Rong Huang, recent HDFS postdoctoral scholar working with Rachel Chazan Cohen, who just started a position as assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Science and Counseling at Austin Peay State University!
Marlene Schwartz interviewed for Washington Post article
Professor Marlene Schwartz was interviewed for the Washington Post article, “Is there really such a thing as a healthy soda?” Spoiler alert – the answer is no.
Tonya Kmetz, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, August 2024
Since graduating in 2008, Tonya has already made an impact in the world of early childhood education and her influence only continues to grow. She credits this success to her time in HDFS at UConn. Tonya came to UConn excited about majoring in HDFS with a concentration in Early Childhood Development and Education and participating in the work-study program at the UConn Child Development Labs. Her classwork with top-notch professors and mentors who weren’t afraid to be progressive, the hours she spent in the amazing Child Labs, and her years as president of the HDFS Undergraduate Committee, were foundational to her future success. Her study of child development, families, diversity, and curriculum set the stage for her advocacy for high-quality and equitable childcare across several states and settings. With a desire to dive more deeply into teacher certification to enable her to serve young children with special needs and in urban settings, Tonya completed a Master’s in Early Childhood Special Education from Southern Connecticut State University in 2012. Tonya strove to acquire a range of experiences to decide where she could have the most impact and to understand experiences of children in different socioeconomic and ability groups. Her full-time work was at a private school in the PreK program. During several summers and weekends, she worked at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for kids with chronic illnesses. She completed student teaching in urban settings within public school elementary classrooms as well as an inclusive Head Start classroom. During graduate school, Tonya completed a summer with Semester at Sea studying Multicultural Education to expand her understanding of early childhood education globally. Tonya then joined Teach For America in New Orleans to work on the complex and urgent educational inequity movement happening there. She started working in one of the most challenging schools in the city. Tonya then moved to a progressive charter management organization called ReNEW Schools where they were starting an early childhood program directly related to her graduate school work. She started in their first early childhood center that would feature classrooms with both students with special needs and typically developing students (often referred to as a collaborative model). Over her eight years with ReNEW, Tonya became Center Director, then Curriculum Specialist, then Instructional Coach for all early childhood programs, and then Director of Early Childhood Programs. Tonya led the original center as well as two additional centers she started with the organization, several public preschool and pre-k grant programs, and a city-wide early intervention program. Tonya led all programs to have high-quality scores on state-wide quality assurance measures ensuring positive early education outcomes that could change the trajectory of young children’s lives. Under her leadership, ReNEW Schools provided fair wages and full benefits for all full-time early childhood educators. Her high standards for herself, the teachers and leaders she mentored, and her programs were grounded in her early work in HDFS and at the Child Labs. She constantly seeks growth and learning for herself but her foundations for what is right for kids and what is possible for them is rooted in the content, mentoring, and experience that she received at UConn from mentors like Anne Bladen, Meg Galante-DeAngelis, Fabienne Doucet, and Kate Andrew.
In 2019, Tonya started a family and relocated to Pennsylvania where she started a consulting firm, Teach Reach Master Consulting, that serves childcare centers, school systems, and families nationally to provide training and coaching. She continues to stretch her impact at local and national levels through providing training to promote the implementation of high-quality interactions, higher-order thinking, and equity-based leadership. Tonya’s time at UConn allowed her to be outside of her comfort zone and lead others. Those challenges provided her the confidence and courage to continue to face larger challenges and adversity after college. She was mentored by women who held the bar high regarding interacting and teaching students to help them meet their highest potential every day. The experience, courage, and confidence she built at UConn, has helped Tonya influence many children and to ensure that ALL children have access to the highest quality of early childhood education.
Alaina Brenick, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, August 2024
Dr. Alaina Brenick is a scholar-activist dedicated to the interdisciplinary and translational approaches fundamental to the field of Human Development and Family Sciences. Drawing from social and developmental psychology, education, social work, and sociology, she is interested in identifying and examining individual, micro-, and macro-level factors that contribute to intergroup conflict, as well as the conditions necessary for reducing prejudice, discrimination, and victimization across development. Specifically, her research focuses on how diverse groups of children, adolescents, and young adults in the U.S. and in other regions of the world—sometimes with vastly different societal structures, norms, and expectations—experience, reason about, and respond to intergroup relations and bias-based victimization (e.g., discrimination, denial of rights, bullying, exclusion based on one’s group membership/identity). She is committed to translating her work into practice. Her work provides a fundamental knowledge base for creating contextually and developmentally appropriate intervention programs, designed to reduce individual prejudice and systemic oppression and promote social equity and positive intergroup relations.
Dr. Brenick is nationally recognized as a leader in DEIJ and anti-racism in developmental science. She is humbled to serve her premier professional organizations in this capacity; in 2020, Dr. Brenick was co-chair of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues’ (SPSSI) annual meeting which was themed, Changing the System: Social Research and Action to Reshape the World We Live In. At SPSSI, Dr. Brenick is on the executive leadership team and helped develop and implement a code of conduct for inclusivity and belonging, secure a million-dollar National Science Foundation ADVANCE grant on Creating Inclusive Scientific Societies through Policies and Practices, publish a resource guide for responding to the War in Gaza, and co-edit a two-volume special issue of Critical Race Theory in the Study of Social Issues. This past year, she served on the planning committee as well as the dissemination committee for the inaugural Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Anti-Racism in Developmental Science Summit. Dr. Brenick has also been tapped to serve SRCD as co-chair for their Anti-Racism Taskforce, as Advisory Board Member for their Data Tracking Initiative, and as a member of the Implementation Taskforce. Through these roles, Dr. Brenick has helped define the foundational Anti-Racism Principles for the society, assess bias in the society’s publications, and devise a plan to implement anti-racist and DEIJ principles and practices. Additionally, Dr. Brenick is the chair of the Inclusion, Equity, and Social Justice committee for the Society for Research on Adolescence. Dr. Brenick has been an invited presenter on this work at conferences for all of these organizations.
Another way in which Dr. Brenick engages as a scholar-activist has been to develop assessments appropriate for the minoritized groups with whom they are used. She believes that when working with minoritized groups, especially dealing with topics of social inequity and victimization, it is critical to accurately reflect and assess their lived experiences. For example, leading a team entirely comprised of sexual and gender minoritized folx (undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral), she engaged directly with the transgender, non-binary, and gender diverse community partners to develop a comprehensive measure of individual and institutional discrimination experienced by these communities. Previously, she worked directly with immigrant youth and their parents to develop a measure of bias-based bullying of immigrant youth. The goal of Dr. Brenick’s community engaged scholarship is to ensure these counternarratives are precisely represented and amplified in the field and in our institutional policies and practices.
Additionally, Dr. Brenick works to decenter the U.S. dominated ethnocentrism in the field of research. Across her career, including during her graduate studies, her post-doctoral training at Friedrich Schiller Universität in Jena, Germany, and her current work, Dr. Brenick has collaborated internationally. Applying a systemic approach to her research, she has explored not just the influences of schools, families, and peers, but also the larger socio-political and historical contexts of youth intergroup dynamics. Her work has assessed the hierarchical social structure of immigrant groups in Germany, children who had or had not been displaced by the Colombian civil war, and the ongoing relations between Palestinian, Palestinian Citizens of Israel, and Jewish-Israeli youth (recent publications: (Brenick, Zureiqi, et al., 2024; Brenick, Eadeh, et al., 2024).
An anti-racist perspective guides Dr. Brenick’s work, emphasizing foci on undoing systems of oppression. In the Middle East, she has designed and evaluated numerous multi-level prejudice reduction interventions. She has collaborated with Sesame Workshop to effectively implement media-based educational programing on Sesame Street to increase understanding of others and reduce prejudice among Palestinian, Palestinian Citizens of Israel, and Jewish-Israeli pre-kindergarteners. Dr. Brenick has also designed interventions that teach social-emotional skills such as empathy, or that provide opportunity for contact between Palestinian Citizens of Israel and Jewish-Israeli children, allowing them to get to know one another and build meaningful relationships with one another. These interventions have been tested longitudinally and in comparison to control groups; they been highly effective in reducing affective, cognitive, and behavioral prejudice and increasing positive bystander interventions in the face of discrimination toward the outgroup. Finally, Dr. Brenick and her colleagues designed a mindfulness intervention in which the ongoing conflict was not mentioned at all. This intervention helped Jewish-Israeli elementary students learn to care for the self, to care for others who were close to them, and then to care for others in general (even those they don’t like). The mindfulness intervention reduced affective prejudice and stereotyping and increased willingness for contact with the outgroup. Dr. Brenick’s intervention work shows great promise for anti-racist action even in the midst of ongoing conflict.
Finally, Dr. Brenick’s scholarship and activism are deeply connected to her mentorship model. She is dedicated to mentoring undergraduate students, especially first-generation students and students from underrepresented minority backgrounds (64% of her mentees). Her student mentees are integrally involved in her work, having co-authored 22 manuscripts and over 60 international and national conference presentations. Additionally, Dr. Brenick has sponsored or PI’ed eight small research grants awarded to her undergraduate mentees to promote their active and early engagement in research. In honor of her mentorship success, she was awarded the UConn Honors Faculty Member of the Year Award and nominated by her mentees for the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award.
Dr. Brenick will always call the charm city, Baltimore, MD, her hometown. Another point of great pride for Dr. Brenick is that Lizzie’s food truck on campus has a veggie burger named for her. Additionally, she loves to garden and tends to over 40 indoor plants (and more every day), to eat when others cook, to knit and crochet—especially fun stuffed animals for her niblings, to take long walks while talking to good friends, and to travel and learn about new people and places. Dr. Brenick’s most important roles are as co-parent to Trent and as World’s Greatest Tanta to her many niblings
Rebecca Puhl featured in Scientific American article
Professor Rebecca Puhl was featured in an article in Scientific American on how “people who are fat and healthy” may help us understand obesity. Read the article here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-who-are-fat-and-healthy-may-hold-keys-to-understanding-obesity/