Congratulations to Terry Berthelot (Assistant Professor in Residence), who was selected to receive the 2021 NAELA John J. Regan Writing Award for her article, “Medicare Appeal Navigation,” published in the 2020 NAELA Journal. The John J. Regan Writing Award is presented annually for the best article published in the NAELA Journal during the previous calendar year. The award selection is made by the members of the NAELA Journal Editorial Board.
Author: Janice Berriault
Margaret Forgione, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, April 2021
Margaret Forgione, BS, Human Development and Family Relations, 1989
Margaret Forgione attended UConn in the 1980’s. While attending UCONN, she was fortunate to have many hands-on experiences that shaped her growth and interest in public service, such as an internship in Hartford at La Casa de Puerto Rico, volunteering at the Mansfield Training School, and serving as a Husky Ambassador in the Admissions office to assist UConn applicants. Margaret says that a public policy course in the Fall of her senior year changed her life by opening up the possibility of working in government and affecting change at a broader level. As a result of this class she applied to Columbia University’s Masters of Public Administration program. Ever since, she’s had a lifelong love of New York City and has been proud to effect change on its streets.
In the years after completing her master’s degree, Margaret held several jobs in New York, including as analyst for the Homes for the Homeless and Senior Analyst at the Office of the Mayor. In 1994, she began working at the New York City Department of Transportation, where she has worked as a special assistant to the first deputy commissioner, the director of the Adopt-a-Highway and Banner Programs, the Manhattan Borough Commissioner, and Chief Operations Officer. In 2021, Margaret was appointed as First Deputy Commissioner, where she serves as second in command and works closer with City Hall. Her work includes managing all aspects of the agency’s 5,000+ employees across all operational divisions, ranging from traffic operations and transportation planning, ferries, bridges, and roadway repair and maintenance, and emergency responses. Some of the agency’s accomplishments in recent years that she has advanced include almost 1,400 miles of bike lanes, a bikeshare program including almost 20,000 bikes, and more recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, new programs such as Open Restaurants and Open Streets.
UConn is in a family affair for the Forgione family. In addition to Margaret, all of her siblings – Anna, Helen, and James Forgione – attended UConn. In addition, Margaret met her husband, Mark Chernauskas, at UConn. They both lived in Beard Dorm which was on South Campus at the time. They currently live in the Bronx, and have two daughters. Mark is retired from General Electric and keeps busy as a beekeeper and working at Captain Lawrence Brewery.
Rachael Farina selected for scholarship award from UConn’s Women’s Center
Graduate student Rachael Farina was selected for one of the 100 Years of Women Scholarship Awards for the 2021 – 2022 academic year from UConn’s Women’s Center. The 100 Years of Women Scholarship fund was established in 1992 to honor a current UConn student or high school senior planning to enroll at UConn who, as a role model and advocate, has advanced the status and contributions of women in society. Rachael was selected for this award in recognition of her outstanding academic achievements, dedicated service, and significant contributions to the advancement of women in society. Congratulations Rachael!
Louisa Baker (HDFS PhD ’13), winner of UConn CETL Univ Teaching Award
Congratulations to Louisa Baker (HDFS PhD ’13), winner of the UConn CETL University Teaching Award for Outstanding Adjunct! Learn about all of the award winners here.
Beth Russell and Eva Lefkowitz quoted in CT Post
Professor Beth Russell and Professor Eva Lefkowitz quoted in an article in the CT Post on the importance of maintaining personal connections during the pandemic. Read the article here.
Laura Mauldin, 2021-22 UConn Humanities Faculty Fellow
Associate Professor Laura Mauldin, 2021-2022 UConn Humanities Faculty Fellow. Congratulations Laura! Read the announcement in UConn Today.
Morica Hutchison, HDFS Graduate Student Spotlight, April 2021
Morica Hutchinson, MA, HDFS Graduate Student
Morica (Rica) Hutchison is a prevention scientist and marital family therapist. She studies the connections between emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and mindfulness in community-based samples of youth and young adults deemed at-risk due to mental health and/or substance use diagnoses. Rica first discovered her passion for bolstering mental and behavioral health outcomes as an undergraduate when she completed an honors thesis on the emotional regulation and behavior of adolescents in substance use recovery and participated in an internship at an intensive outpatient program for adolescents focused on group and family-based therapy.
For her dissertation, Rica has been facilitating an eight-session mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) for youth enrolled in community-based outpatient therapy programs. The youth present with diagnoses such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, and a history of suicidal behavior or adverse experiences such as sexual abuse, neglect, multiple/disrupted family and/or foster placements, witness to parental substance use, or domestic violence. Her dissertation examines how MBI’s can support at-risk youth’s development of adaptive coping skills and thwart adverse mental and behavioral health outcomes.
During her time as a doctoral and master’s student, Rica has taught several in-person and online HDFS courses, including: Family Life Education, Research Methods, Honors Proseminar, and Honors Thesis Preparation Seminar.
Following graduation, Rica will become a postdoctoral scholar in suicide prevention at the University of Rochester Department of Psychiatry. This further training will allow her to identify effective prevention strategies and program implementation for at-risk youth and young adults for use in applied settings, including mental health treatment facilities, non-profit organizations providing treatment to high-risk youth and young adults, and other agencies that offer training for child and family services workers. Dissemination of such preventative and intervention strategies will foster adaptive coping skills, reduce the burden of mental health adversities on youth and young adults, and increase access to care coordination for individuals and families presenting with ongoing difficulties.
In her spare time, Rica loves baking, travelling to new places, and adding to her collection of plants. She has three cats (Rae, Goose and Pickles), which keep her entertained while working from home.
Alaina Brenick, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, April 2021
Associate Professor
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 group-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.
A first step of scholar-activism in Dr. Brenick’s work has been to develop assessments appropriate for the minoritized groups with whom they are used. She believes that when working with minority groups, especially dealing with topics of social inequity and victimization, it is critical to accurately reflect and assess their lived experiences. As a result, she is working with members of the transgender and gender non-binary communities directly to develop a comprehensive measure of individual and institutional discrimination experienced by this community. Previously, in collaboration with Dr. Linda Halgunseth, she worked directly with immigrant youth and their parents to develop a measure of bias-based bullying of immigrant youth. The voices of these communities are now empowered in the field through precise representation.
A second step in Dr. Brenick’s scholar-activism is 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-Israeli, and Jewish-Israeli youth.
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-Israeli, 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-Israeli 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.
In a recent chapter adopting an anti-racist approach, (No) space for prejudice! Varied forms of negative outgroup attitudes and ethnic discrimination and how they develop or can be prevented in the classroom, Dr. Brenick and her colleagues systemically reviewed the literature on prejudice in schools. The chapter is published in the Handbook of Children and Prejudice: Integrating Research, Practice, and Policy—downloaded over 40,000 times! https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-12228-7 —and emphasizes turning knowledge and awareness into practice and policy. It is also being turned into a video series, with the Center for Culture, Health, and Human Development, to help make educational environments safer and more inclusion for all students.
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.
Stephen M. Gavazzi graduated in 1986 with his master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy prior to completing his Family Studies doctorate in 1991. Upon graduation, he accepted a position at The Ohio State University, where he has remained for the past 30 years. For many years, Steve’s scholarship remained closely connected to two of his committee members – UConn professor emeritus Steve Anderson and UConn professor emeritus Ron Sabatelli – with a strong focus on issues pertaining to families with adolescents. After publishing 50+ articles on this topic, Steve’s first book – Families with Adolescents: Bridging the Gaps Between Theory, Research, and Practice – was published by Springer Press in 2011. His service in two administrative positions – as Director of The Ohio State University’s Center for Family Research and Dean of Ohio State’s Mansfield regional campus – ignited an interest in the topic of land-grant universities, with a special emphasis on the community engagement activities that are embedded in the land-grant mission. Steve’s first book on this topic – Land-Grant Universities for the Future: Higher Education for the Public Good – was co-authored by West Virginia University president E. Gordon Gee and published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2018. A second book on the public’s perceptions of higher education – titled What’s Public About Public Higher Ed? – written by Gavazzi and Gee will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in early fall 2021. Most recently, Steve has focused his attention on the debt that land-grant universities across the country owe to Native American tribes. That is, the “land” in “land-grant” came from broken treaties and acts of violence perpetrated on Indigenous peoples. This “Original Sin” of the land-grant universities is the subject of several new publications that Steve has written. Currently, he is leading a research project that engages Tribal Leaders in discussions about the reparative actions that land-grant universities can take in service to healing the harm caused by these historical atrocities.
Professor Marlene Schwartz was featured in