Author: Mccardell, Karizma

Cali Salafia, HDFS Graduate Spotlight March 2025

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Headshot, Caroline (Cali) SalafiaCali Salafia is a Ph.D. candidate in HDFS who plans to defend her dissertation and graduate in Spring 2025. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in philosophy from the University at Albany (SUNY) in 2017 and obtained a master’s degree in health psychology from Central Connecticut State University in 2020.

Cali has worked with her advisor and mentor, Dr. Keith Bellizzi, throughout the program on an NIH-funded longitudinal study examining resilience trajectories among over 550 individuals newly diagnosed with breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer. She was fortunate to engage in nearly every aspect of this project, from participant recruitment to presentations and publications. During her doctoral training, Cali developed research interests focused on medical decision-making and family communication regarding cancer risk and treatment. Her dissertation focuses on examining the sources of health information that women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer utilized to inform their surgical decision-making. She carried out an online survey of more than 200 women, asking them to report the sources they used, how these sources influenced their surgical treatment decisions, and their level of decisional regret regarding their surgical treatment. Cali has just accepted a T32 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Psycho-Oncology in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, set to begin at the end of Summer 2025. She looks forward to moving to New York City and gaining additional training to pursue an academic research career.

Outside of work, Cali enjoys coffee shops, hiking in New Hampshire, reading fiction, hot yoga, and spending time with her loved ones.

Eva Lefkowitz, HDFS Faculty Spotlight March 2025

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Eva Lefkowitz lived in Connecticut the first 18 years of her life. After living in the Boston area for six years, she earned her Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles in Developmental Psychology.  She then served as a professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the Pennsylvania State University for 18 years, including roles as Professor-in-Charge of the HDFS Graduate Program and Professor-in-Charge of the Undergraduate Program. In 2016 Eva moved to UConn to become Department Head of HDFS. In her almost nine years as department head, Eva has enjoyed getting to know the faculty, staff, and students in HDFS, CLAS, and UConn.  

Eva’s research has two primary areas: (1) sexual health and (2) wellbeing among LGBTQ+ adolescents and young adults. In the first area, she uses a developmental perspective to examine predictors of negative and positive aspects of sexual health, and the broader health and relationship implications of sexual health. Her research demonstrates that a range of individual and contextual factors, from the couple level of who the partner is up to the institutional level of identification with a religious institution, are associated with sexual health. In addition, her research highlights the importance of sexual behaviors beyond their implications for physical health, demonstrating that by young adulthood, sexual behavior can positively contribute to well-being. Eva views mentoring as the most important and rewarding aspect of her career, and her students strongly influence the direction of her research. In the second area, driven by the interests of some of her UConn graduate students, she has examined wellbeing and identity expression among LGBTQ+ college students, and how relational and contextual factors influence these areas. She and her students received funding and collected data on LGBTQ+ college students around the country as they adjusted to the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently they collected data on how LGBTQ+ students’ experiences with family, peers, romantic partners, and close others affect their well-being, and how academic breaks may change these experiences.   

 Eva has served as a principal investigator, co-investigator, or faculty mentor on projects funded by the NICHD, NIAAA, NIDA, NIA, and the WT Grant Foundation. She has published 108 peer reviewed articles and book chapters. At the national level, Eva has been in leadership roles for the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) and the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood (SSEA). She has contributed to the review process as Associate Editor for Developmental Psychology, on the editorial boards of Journal of Research on Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood, as a reviewer for more than 25 other journals, and as a Review Panel Chair and Reviewer for SRA, SRCD, and SSEA. She also has reviewed grant proposals for NIH, and for similar federal agencies outside the United States. In 2008 Eva received the Evelyn R. Saubel Faculty Award from the Penn State College of Health and Human Development.  

 At UConn, Eva’s favorite classes to teach have been the 350 student lifespan individual and family development class (for many students, their first college class ever), and a small graduate seminar on professional and career development.  

 When not working, Eva spends time with her husband Eric, also a UConn professor, and enjoys visiting  her twins, both college first years, who were frequently delighted by a childhood filled with are her extensive knowledge of adolescent development (not exactly). Eva loves cooking and baking, walking, beach vacations, and listening to audiobooks, and still hasn’t figured out how to write a spotlight that doesn’t sound like a dating app profile. 

Antonia Caba, HDFS Graduate Spotlight February 2025

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Antonia Caba completed her PhD in Fall 2024. She earned her bachelor’s degree in public health from Miami University in 2018 and her master’s in public health from Yale School of Public Health in 2020. In her time at UConn, Antonia worked on quantitative and qualitative research projects related to the determinants of health and wellbeing among LGBTQ+ adolescents and young adults. Under the mentorship of Dr. Ryan Watson, Antonia contributed to an NIH-funded, longitudinal study of Black and Latinx sexual minority men’s HIV prevention practices and a national survey of LGBTQ+ adolescents’ health and wellbeing in partnership with the Human Rights Campaign. Antonia’s dissertation focused on the role of social media and the internet in LGBTQ+ adolescents’ identity development.

Currently, Antonia is a Research Associate at the UConn School of Social Work, where she is a member of the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood-UConn School of Social Work Research Partnership. She supports the evaluation of state- and federally funded early childhood initiatives and systems in order to ensure access to high-quality early childhood care and education for Connecticut families.

Outside of work, Antonia can be found cooking, baking sourdough bread, hiking, working on embroidery projects, and exploring and traveling throughout New England and beyond!

Lauren Lafferty, HDFS Alumni Spotlight, February 2025

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Lauren Lafferty graduated with a BS in HDFS in 2005. During her time at UConn she led the HDFS student government, was named a New England Scholar, presented a thesis as an undergraduate and was later awarded an outstanding women’s award from the UConn Alumni Foundation. Lauren credits her HDFS degree as the bedrock for a nearly 20-year career focused on keeping families and children at the center of her equity focused work.

 

After graduating from UConn, Lauren worked for the Village for Families and Children in Hartford in out-of-school-time programming. Her work at the Village, combined with her HDFS background, fueled a desire to pursue her master’s degree. She moved to Boston and completed a master’s in education with a concentration in Risk and Prevention at Harvard University’s School of Education in 2008. At Harvard, Lauren was energized by her work as a Prevention Intern at the Gardner Pilot Academy (GPA), a community school in Boston. At this school she developed an ambition for high quality urban public education, led by a principal who excelled in this incredible work, allowing her to see the best practices in the field come to life.

 

In 2008 Lauren began her 16-year tenure at GPA. During this time, she designed, led and fundraised successfully for interventions, programs and partnerships that met the highest quality standards and supported families to thrive. She was tasked with funding the gap to ensure access to opportunity and quality learning for students beyond the public-school budget allocation. As a result of this work, Lauren raised and managed an average of $700,000 per year through grant writing and fundraising initiatives. Her work also required partnering with over 15 funders and 30 partners annually. Due to these efforts, GPA’s chronic absenteeism rate was lower than both the state and district averages, the family teacher conference rate of 100% was met annually and over 300 students and family members received basic needs in the form of clothing and food annually. As Senior Director of Extended Services, Lauren consulted, mentored and presented to many individuals from the field of community schools, early education, and prevention, all built off the foundation of HDFS.

 

Lauren is currently the Chief Program Officer at YWCA New Britain. In this role, she uses her collective experiences working in diverse urban communities for the past 20 years to support innovative programs and partnerships at the YWCA. She continues to work with an empowerment-focused and anti-racist lens, central to the YWCA mission, closing opportunity gaps through financial development.

 

Lauren currently resides in West Hartford, CT with her husband Gary and is the proud mom to Julia (4th grade) and Ava (1st grade). As someone raised in a large, loud and loving extended family, Lauren enjoys spending time with her many family members, friends and neighbors.

Anne Bladen, HDFS Faculty Spotlight February 2025

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headshot- Anne BladenAnne Bladen has spent her career supporting families, children and students. After earning her BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College, she worked as a bilingual Welfare Caseworker in Willimantic, CT, during a time period marked by the AIDS crisis, opioid epidemic, and severe cuts to social programs. Seeing the challenges her clients faced, Anne decided to shift gears and focus on making an impact earlier in people’s lives. Reflecting on her volunteer work with young children in high school and college, she applied to UConn’s Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates.

 

Anne completed her MA in special education, focusing on children with special needs and implementing Alternative and Augmentative Communication with bilingual  preschool children. Her teaching journey began in Hartford’s public preschools, where she discovered the power of early intervention. After leaving Hartford, Anne taught special education for preschoolers and their typically developing peers as well as resource room support for students in grades K-4.

 

In 1996, Anne joined the UConn Child Development Labs (CDL) as a kindergarten teacher, later becoming the Special Needs Coordinator and then the Executive Director of the Child Labs, a position she held until 2021. Some of the highlights of these years included building a more nature-based program, working with teachers on play-based curriculum, teaching pre-service teachers in Early Childhood Specializations and developing collaborative relationships with other UConn departments such as Kinesiology, Communication Sciences, and Psychology to support both children at the Child Labs and UConn students.

 

In 2021, Anne transitioned to a full-time teaching faculty role in HDFS. This change has offered new opportunities, such as teaching different (and bigger!) classes but also keeps her deeply connected with the Child Labs and the incredible teachers who have been her community for so many years. In conjunction with the CDL teachers, Anne developed and started teaching HDFS 2142E: Exploring Conservation and Sustainability with Preschoolers in 2022, allowing her to continue to share her passion for nature with children and students. Anne has also had the opportunity to return to her Windham roots, building a partnership with the Head Start and Early Head Start programs so that students in HDFS 3192 (supervised fieldwork) now have placements in those programs, deeply enriching their experiences.

 

At home, in the Mansfield Hollow Historic District, Anne enjoys gardening, quilting, biking, and watching clouds and birds from the hammock. Her son, a UConn grad, works for the Conservation Fund and her daughter is an incoming member of the UConn class of 2029!