Congratulations to Professor Preston Britner, recipient of the Provost’s Outstanding Service Award. This award is designed to honor faculty whose service to UConn is exemplary and has made an indelible impact in one or more areas to enhance the University’s mission in teaching, research, service, or engagement. So well earned!

Rachel Chazan Cohen joined the UConn HDFS faculty in August 2020. While starting a new position during a global pandemic and teaching online for the first time certainly posed challenges, the last three years has been a very productive period, much of which she attributes to the UConn context. 

Rachel’s work continues to focus on factors influencing the development of children, and on the creation, evaluation, and improvement of intervention programs for families with infants and toddlers. She is extremely proud of the UConn early childhood faculty and the work that they do to prepare students to work with young children and their families. Rachel and Caitlin Lombardi formed the ARC lab in Fall 2022 and have been successful in bringing together a community of postdocs, graduate students and undergraduate students to work on grants and contracts to study the accessibility and effectiveness of services families receive when their children are young.

Rachel’s overarching goal is to bridge the worlds of research, practice, and policy. She works with local early childhood programs on improving practice as well as with states and the federal government on policies to support programs and families. Over the past three years she has made connections with the CT Office of Early Childhood and especially focuses on how CT serves families with infants and toddlers.

The last three years have also brough many changes on her home front. Rachel’s children (twins) started college in Fall 2022, giving her a new perspective on working with undergraduate students. In her last faculty spotlight in September 2020 she mentioned a plan to start making wine in her basement…that has come to pass. She is now making very tasty red, white and rosé wine.  She and her husband continue to enjoy travel, hiking, and playing with their energetic adult dog.

Associate Professor Laura Mauldin was chosen as a nonfiction participant in the prestigious and highly selective Bread Loaf Writers Conference for 2023. It is an opportunity to network, receive feedback, and write with world renowned authors and faculty.

Yahoo! Lifestyle quoted and mentioned the work of Professor Rebecca Puhl in their article “What New York’s New Weight Discrimination Bill Means for Weight Stigma”.

Also, JD Supra mentioned the work of Rebecca Puhl in their “Better Health Care Newsletter – June 2023”. Click here to read the newsletter.

Professor Marlene Schwartz was featured in UConn Today for a new grant on school wellness in CT. Read the article here.

Dr. Shannon Weaver came to UConn in 2002, excited to join a faculty whose members included experts in family policy and dynamics and whose work she had reviewed while studying for her degrees in HDFS. Shannon became interested in HDFS like  many of the majors here, when she took a lifespan development course that was required for her major at the time (nursing). After taking this class, Shannon declared an HDFS major and went on to complete both a BS and MS in HDFS with a concentration in Gender Studies and a PhD in Human Environmental Sciences, Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Missouri.

As her first experience with HDFS was with a lifespan course, Shannon greatly enjoys teaching HDFS 1070 Individual and Family Development in both large lecture and smaller online formats. She is also the Faculty Coordinator for the Early College Experience offering of HDFS 1070 in high schools across Connecticut. Frustrated by the lack of family material in most traditional human development texts, in 2018 she published a textbook to create a more inclusive and engaging reading experience for students. Years ago she created and proposed the popular HDFS 1060 Close Relationships Across the Lifespan course, which she continues to teach. Shannon values opportunities to engage students in learning material that will benefit them in their future professional and personal lives. Because she promotes student understanding by relating concepts to their own experiences and popular media, she was excited to be able to combine her two favorite interests, HDFS and Star Wars, to create a First Year Honors course: To Belong We Need: Exploring the Importance of Relational Connections Through Star Wars.

A committed feminist family scholar, Shannon emphasizes what she and co-author Elizabeth Sharp term feminist accountability. This concept was first discussed in their featured article in the Journal of Family Theory and Review in 2015 and discussion on the JFTR blog. She served as Chair/Past Chair of the Feminism and Family Studies Section for the National Council on Family Relations and a Co-Chair for the 2015 NCFR preconference, “Eradicating Sexual Violence on College Campuses: Putting Patriarchy in its Place.” This led to her co-editing a special 2017 volume of Family Relations, “Feminist Framings of Sexual Assault on College Campuses: Conceptual, Empirical, and Practical Innovations.”

Shannon’s current project, co-directed with Carol Johnston at East Carolina University, is the nationwide, longitudinal study entitled Children, Parents, Relationships and COVID-19 (CPR-C) with 1,000 initial participants. Early on, Shannon noticed that news stories and social media discussions by primarily mothers related the increased stress parents were experiencing while attempting to balance multiple family needs in the face of new problems and great uncertainty. Finding no existing measures of parental stress applicable to the unique stressors parents were encountering due to COVID, Shannon developed the Parenting During Covid-19 Stressors Scale (PDCS). Now about to collect the fourth wave of data, Shannon is creating a questionnaire to assess issues encountered as some return to “normal” while others may still be dealing with lingering health issues (e.g., Long Covid).

A second current research focus involves family rituals and the often hidden labor performed by women for these important family experiences. While many family scholars and therapists acknowledge that rituals are important for family functioning, the actual work and allocation of human and economic resources that makes such events possible has rarely been explored. Shannon hopes to address this lacuna in the family science literature through survey and interview data with women planning for family rituals in general, and family gatherings, in particular, for holidays.

Outside of work, you will find Shannon with her husband and their three children at their Wellesley home chasing around three rescue cats and trying not to be talked into adopting a fourth. When able, she spends time on numerous home improvement projects for their almost 90 year old house that seems to be constantly in need of repairs and baking crazy cakes for family birthdays and events. After spending her childhood years in Kansas City MO and summers in San Antonio TX, she is now always on the lookout for good BBQ (KC burnt ends anyone??). However, she will always make clear that while she will try any BBQ she can find in the Northeast, Kansas City style is vastly superior to that of Memphis, Carolina, or Texas.

Associate Professor Kari Adamsons was featured in WalletHub’s recent artcle about Best States for working Dads. Read the article here.

Associate Professor Laura Mauldin’s article won the Best Publication Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Disability in Society: Mauldin, L., & Brown, R. L. (2021). Missing pieces: Engaging sociology of disability in medical sociology. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 62(4), 477-492.

Associate Professor Beth Russell is a MPI on a Research Excellence Program (REP) grant through the OVPR, “A Mind-Body Intervention to Reduce Distress and Promote Wellbeing in LGBQT+ College Students”. This 2 year project tests asynchronous online stress management programming for this historically marginalized population of young adults.

Gente Sana|Cortaporlosano quoted a study coauthored by Professors Rebecca Puhl and Marlene Schwartz. Read the article here.  Cortaporlosano also quoted a study by Rebecca in a separate article. Read that article here.