Faculty

Kim Gans, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, July 2025

Headshot, Kim GansKim Gans grew up near Philadelphia in Havertown, Pennsylvania. She went to Duke University as a first-generation college student and earned a BS in Biology. She took all the pre-med courses, but switched her interests after taking a course on food and hunger. She completed a Master’s degree in Public Health, with an emphasis in Nutrition at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. For her field experience, she worked at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston with their cardiovascular disease prevention program. During that time, she learned about the Pawtucket Heart Health Program in Rhode Island, one of three NIH-funded community-based heart disease prevention projects in the US, and moved to RI to work for this program in 1986. As part of that job, she developed, implemented, and evaluated heart disease prevention interventions in worksites, schools, restaurants, grocery stores, churches, and with health care providers. While working, she went back to school at the University of Rhode Island to get her Ph.D. in Nutrition. Upon graduation, she became an Assistant Professor (Research) in Community Health at Brown University, which later became the Brown School of Public Health. Kim was on the Brown faculty from 1992-2014 and also served as Deputy Director and later Director of the Brown Institute for Community Health Promotion. In 2014, she joined the UConn HDFS faculty.

Kim is a nutritionist and behavioral health researcher with almost 40 years of experience in intervention development and evaluation research in community-based settings to improve eating habits, prevent/control obesity, and/or increase physical activity. Her work spans the lifespan from young children to older adults with a focus on low-income and ethnic minority populations. She has been PI or Co-PI of 29 externally funded grants (including 9 NIH R01s and 2 R18s) and Co-I on 28 externally funded grants. Her funding has come from NHLBI, NCI, NICHD, NINR, NIMHD, NIDDK, CDC, USDA, Administration on Aging, multiple foundations, and state agencies. She has published 138 peer-reviewed articles and several book chapters. She has also developed numerous educational materials, programs, and dietary assessment tools for the public and providers, including Rate Your Plate and REAP (Rapid Eating and Activity Assessment for Providers), which are widely used nationally.

Much of Kim’s research includes multi-level, community-engaged approaches to improve diet and/or physical activity through changing home, work, school, childcare, and neighborhood nutrition and physical activity environments in conjunction with behavioral interventions. Her research has also focused on applications of innovative health technology, particularly computerized tailoring using print, video, web and/or texting. She also engages in translational research to study dissemination/implementation of effective interventions to various community and clinical settings. Kim is an avid collaborator who enjoys creating multidisciplinary research teams, and a passionate mentor – serving as primary mentor for junior faculty on 6 K grants, 6 diversity supplements, and co-mentor on many more. She has won awards for her mentoring as well as her research.

Kim’s current federal grants support intervention research to improve Southeast Asian children’s diets, to work with family child care providers and/or families to improve the dietary behaviors of preschool children, to understand the impact of enhancements to Meals on Wheels home-delivered meal services on older adults’ health and well-being, and to test the feasibility of incorporating digital obesity prevention modules into the Parents as Teachers home visitation program for families with infants.

Kim currently serves in several leadership roles at InCHIP and has held leadership positions with the American Public Health Association, American Heart Association, International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, Association of Schools of Public Health and Nutrition and Obesity Policy Research and Evaluation Network. Locally, she has served on committees for the RI Multiple Sclerosis Society, RI Food Policy Council, and RI Hunger Elimination Task Force. She also served as Director of Community Engagement for the Brown School of Public Health from 2020-2022.

Outside of work, Kim enjoys traveling, reading books (she has been in the same book club since 1986), genealogy research, wine-tasting, daily New York Times word puzzles and crosswords, going to the beach, weight training, boxing, and walking her standard poodle Basil.

Beth Russell recipient of Research Excellence Award

Headshot. Beth RussellCongratulations to Beth Russell, recipient of this year’s InCHIP Community-Engaged Health Research Excellence Award. This award recognizes a faculty member who has demonstrated excellence in health-related research conducted in collaboration with one or more community organizations and consistent with the mission of InCHIP.

Marlene Schwartz, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, June 2025

Headshot. Marlene SchwartzMarlene Schwartz is a Professor in HDFS and Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health. She grew up Columbia, Maryland and graduated from Haverford College in Pennsylvania with a BA in Psychology in 1988.  After college she moved back to Maryland and worked for two years as an RA in Marion Radke-Yarrow’s lab at the National Institute of Mental Health.

In 1990, Marlene moved to New Haven to begin graduate school in Clinical Psychology at Yale.  Her first two years, she worked with Edward Zigler and participated in the Bush Center for Child Development and Social Policy. In her third year, she began working with Kelly Brownell and shifted her focus to the clinical treatment of eating disorder and obesity. She completed her pre-doctoral clinical internship at the Substance Abuse Treatment Unit at the Yale School of Medicine.

In 1996, Brownell hired Marlene as the Co-Director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, where she provided treatment for adults and children, and supervised graduate student and post-doctoral trainees. In the early 2000’s, there was a notable increase in the number of children with obesity who were presenting at the clinic. Marlene delivered family-based obesity treatments, but increasingly felt like her efforts to help families were undermined by the unhealthy food environment. She saw the power of food marketing and the lack of healthy options in schools as significant obstacles for her patients and decided to shift her research focus to documenting the poor nutritional quality of children’s cereals, restaurant “children’s meals,” and school food. Concurrently, her own children were in preschool and elementary school, so she also got involved as a parent in trying to make changes in these settings.

In 2006, Kelly Brownell asked Marlene to be the Deputy Director as he founded the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. Marlene’s research focused on improving school nutrition environment. She collaborated with the Connecticut State Department of Education to assess school wellness policies and advocated for the 2006 law to remove beverage vending machines from schools. She developed an online Wellness School Assessment Tool (www.wellsat.org), which helps school districts comply with USDA regulations and has been used to code thousands of policies since 2010.  Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative provided new opportunities to contribute to the national conversation, including a visit to the White House to celebrate the regulations that emerged from the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act.

In 2013, Marlene became the Director of the Rudd Center and in 2015, the Rudd Center moved to UConn to join InCHIP and set up offices in Hartford. Marlene joined HDFS where she teaches an undergraduate course, “Food and the American Family.” She continues to study school wellness policies and has expanded this work in collaboration with her Neag colleague, Sandy Chafouleas, to consider the whole child.  She also has a second line of research on how to improve nutrition in the food banking system, which was inspired by her experience as a board member of the Connecticut Food Bank. Through this work she has developed an app that helps food bankers assess and track the nutritional quality of their inventory. Looking back, her favorite projects are ones that combine research, advocacy, and creating practical, data-driven tools for use in the field.

Research by Alyssa Clark and Eva Lefkowitz highlighted in media

Headshot, Alyssa Clark
Alyssa Clark
Headshot, Eva Lefkowitz
Eva Lefkowitz

Alyssa Clark (PhD ’23) and Eva Lefkowitz’s research on associations of sexual and affection behaviors and sexual with relationship and sexual satisfaction was highlighted recently in the media:

Laura Donorfio heads up UConn Waterbury’s 3rd Annual Pride Party

Headshot, Laura Donorfio
Laura Donorfio

Laura Donorfio, Katherine Garcia (undergraduate student), and Joanna Szeto (UConn Alum) organized UConn Waterbury’s 3rd Annual Pride Party (4/1/25). This year’s theme was “Trans Rights are Human Rights” (National Trans Day of Visibility occurs on 5/31) and featured 2 UConn alum and 1 undergraduate student as keynote speakers: Matt Blinstrubas, Executive Director, from Equality CT (2009); Alderman Bilal Tajildeen, 5th District of Waterbury (UConn ‘12), and Tyler Rivera, Waterbury undergraduate student, sharing his life and trans experience. Over 17 community organizations and businesses from across Connecticut participated, sharing LGBTQIA+ resources and opportunities, including the health department with free STI testing. Also, UConn Waterbury’s Career Center, Library, and Student Health and Wellness (SHaW) shared essential LGBTQIA+ resources. Over 100+ students and faculty attended. The goal of the Pride Party is to be educational and to create a campus environment where all identities and all colors feel respected and welcomed.