Author: Janice Berriault

Cheryl Hilton (BS ’91), HDFS Alumni Spotlight, July 2024

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Cheryl HiltonCheryl Hilton, a UConn graduate from 1991 with a BS in Human Development and Family Relations (HDFR) with a concentration in social policy and public relations, has made significant contributions in various fields. During her time at UConn, Hilton was actively involved as a Husky Ambassador, Campus Tour Guide, and an active member of the H. Fred Simons African American Cultural Center.

After graduation Hilton embarked on a 14-year career in health and welfare insurance. However, her entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to service led her to pivot into real estate. Recognizing disparities in the industry she created the Greater Hartford Association of Realtors Bridge Committee, Connecticut’s first and longest running real estate diversity, equity, and inclusion committee. In 2016, she along with a committee member championed the reintroduction of Fair Housing Education as a mandatory, in-person continuing education requirement, earning her The Connecticut Fair Housing Empowering Communities Award.

In 2020, Hilton shifted her focus to continuing education curriculum creation and instruction. She was the key content creator and played a pivotal role in developing the groundbreaking course “Understanding and Preventing Bias in your Real Estate Practice,” which she taught to over 8,000 real estate licensees in 2021. Her impact extended beyond real estate. Hilton served two consecutive terms on the Greater Hartford Association of Realtors Board of Directors, two consecutive terms on the Connecticut Board of Directors, and served as a Commissioner of The Southington Housing Authority. In 2021, she received the prestigious Realtor of The Year award from the Greater Hartford Association of Realtors.

In the fall of 2023, Hilton transitioned to a hospital administrator’s position, managing the Community Health and Well Being Department at Saint Mary’s Hospital / Trinity Health Of New England in Waterbury, CT. Driven by a desire to make a difference, Hilton founded The Hilton Advocacy Group, LLC in 2010. Through this organization, she passionately advocates for K-12 students with Individual Education Programs (IEPs), 504 Plans, and those facing racial or LBGTQIA+ issues. In 2019 she joined RE-Center’s Race & Equity Board of Directors, where today she serves as the Board Secretary. Hilton’s commitment to service extends to her role as the current President of The Waterbury (CT) Chapter of The Links, Incorporated, where she has been a proud and active member since 2006.

Hilton resides in Southington, CT with her spouse and fellow UConn Alum Howard Campbell. She is the proud mother of Jared Campbell (RPI,’22, BArch) and Trent Campbell (UConn, Storrs Poli Sci Class of 2026).

Veronica Hanna-Walker, Graduate Student Spotlight, July 2024

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Veronica Hanna-WalkerVeronica Hanna-Walker will complete her Ph.D. in Summer 2024. She enrolled in the HDFS program in 2020 to work with Dr. Eva Lefkowitz on research about sexual identity development and the health and health-related outcomes of sexual and gender diverse (SGD) youth and young adults. During graduate school, Veronica worked on several research projects, including a longitudinal project examining SGD college students’ health and well-being during academic breaks with Dr. Lefkowitz.

Veronica successfully defended her dissertation in May. In her dissertation, she used qualitative and quantitative methods to understand the role of religion in SGD youth’s and young adults’ lives. Findings included a better understanding of SGD youth’s experiences of religious parents’ reactions to their diverse sexual orientations and gender identities along with narratives from SGD young adults’ experiences in religions that are disaffirming of sexual and gender diversity.

Veronica recently accepted a position as a research associate at UConn’s School of Social Work. She intends to continue pursuing applied research. Outside of work, Veronica can be found hiking, reading, walking, or working out.

Sara Harkness, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, July 2024

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Sara HarknessSara Harkness has always been fascinated by other languages and cultures, and how culture shapes human development and families. She has lived, studied, and worked in many different cultural places including Sweden, Colombia, Guatemala, Kenya, and The Netherlands, and has collaborated on research with colleagues in Italy, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, Poland, Australia, and Korea. Sara’s first research project, as a doctoral student in social anthropology at Harvard, was a study of children’s acquisition of basic color terms in two different language communities in Guatemala, one Spanish-speaking and the other Mam (a Mayan language) (Harkness, 1973). At Harvard, Sara met and married the love of her life, Charlie Super, and together they travelled to Kenya where for the next three years they carried out research on children and families in a rural Kipsigis village. This work led to the formulation of the “developmental niche” framework for studying the cultural construction of children’s development (Super & Harkness, 1986).

Informed by this framework and its further elaboration in “parental ethnotheories,” Sara and Charlie, together with colleagues in The Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Australia, and the U.S. carried out research, supported by the Spencer Foundation, on parenting and children’s development in Western societies, with a particular focus on home-school relations (Harkness et al., 2007). Subsequent studies, supported in part by NIH, have explored cultural patterns in regulation of state of arousal in infants and their mothers in The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Korea, and the U.S. as measured by salivary cortisol (Super, 2011).

Since 1996, Sara has served as professor in HDFS and Pediatrics, and Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Health, and Human Development (CHHD). The CHHD’s Graduate Certificate program has provided research training for students in five departments; four CHHD students presented their projects at the June 2024 meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development. Through the CHHD, UConn has established relationships with Radboud University (The Netherlands), and the University of Botswana, including an online exchange program for graduate students. The CHHD has also partnered since 2000 with the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood (OEC); the latest 3-year contract includes research on racial/ethnic disparities in perinatal health, and the development of a new program to train home visitors in the use of temperament assessments and tips for parents.

In addition to her work at UConn, Sara spent 2012-2013 in Washington D.C. as a Jefferson Science Fellow, working as a Senior Advisor in Education and Health in the Latin American and Caribbean Bureau of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Sara and Charlie’s work has been jointly recognized by an award from the Society for Research in Child Development for “Distinguished contributions to cultural and contextual factors in child development” (2009), and by Division 52 of the American Psychological Association’s Jean Lau Chin Award for Outstanding Psychologist in International Leadership Contributions (2022).