Associate Professor Laura Donorfio was featured in UConn Today highlighting both her honor of receiving the Clark Tibbitts Award and for her work research project on drag expression. Read the article here.

Associate Professor

Dr. Kari Adamsons came to UConn 15 years ago, in 2007, following a journey that was anything but straightforward. Her first two years of undergraduate were as an international relations major with a specialization in Russian foreign policy (which has come in dismayingly handy in the last few years), but in her last two years she switched tracks and ultimately earned a BA in psychology. She then moved to North Carolina, ostensibly to work for a year and gain in-state residency before going back to graduate school in “something psychology-ish,” but instead she spent 6 years working as a paralegal for an insurance defense law firm. She eventually dropped back to working part-time at the law firm while getting her masters in HDFS at University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), with a plan to DFSwork with non-profit agencies. However, during her master’s program, she tried working with non-profit agencies and discovered it was not for her, and so she continued on to get her PhD in HDFS UNCG. After a one-year post-doctoral fellowship with UNCG’s Center for Youth, Family, and Community Partnerships, she joined UConn as an assistant professor of HDFS, and she cannot imagine a profession that would suit her better. Her favorite parts of her job are that there are so many different parts to her job, making it difficult to burn out on any single one. She loves the energy involved in teaching and mentoring, both graduate and undergraduate, and then recharging by hiding in her office and analyzing data, intermingled with occasional community trainings and applied work to remind her why she studies the things that she does.

Broadly speaking, Kari studies fathers, which has allowed her to dabble in a number of different content areas; by simply adding the phrase “with fathers” to any subject, a new area is open for exploration. To date, she has examined subjects such as the development and expression of fathering identities during the transition to parenthood, fathers’ influence on child obesity, nonresident fathering and shared parenting following divorce (and recently, during COVID), and most recently, the processes involved in the transmission of risk behaviors such as substance use between fathers and adolescent children. Her passion for understanding and including fathers arose from experiences she had in college. At the time, Kari was interested in the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect, and her experiences included an internship with the Washington DC law office responsible for assessing and advocating for children’s “best interests” in cases where abused children had been or were going to be removed from their homes. That experience led her to a local children’s advocacy organization, who requested research on whether fathers influenced children’s outcomes and should, therefore, be included in their abuse prevention efforts (which had previously and exclusively focused on mothers); spoiler alert, the answer (which might seem obvious now, but was relatively unknown at the time) was yes, they do, and yes, they should. Carrying that experience into graduate school, Kari noticed that in virtually every class about parents and families, all of the research talked about “parents,” but all of the samples focused only on mothers. Unwilling to simply accept these gaps in our understanding of families, she has spent the last 20 years working to contribute to our knowledge of the varied and important ways fathers influence children and families. Kari also is fascinated by family theories and methodologies, and especially the ways that the theoretical lens or methodology we employ influence our findings as well as our interpretation of those results. In that vein, she has published several theoretical papers, a textbook on family theories, and is co-editor of the upcoming Sourcebook of Family Theories and Methodologies (due out this summer).

When she’s not working, Kari enjoys relaxing with her husband at their home, located on just under 20 acres in Columbia, CT, and playing with the family pets, which currently include 2 dogs, 12 chickens, and 5 rats. She’s a rabid fan of the Washington Capitals, Dallas Cowboys, Boston Red Sox, and UConn basketball (women’s and men’s), and also enjoys watching golf and tennis, and she enjoys watching them all the more so because she is skilled at exactly zero of those sports herself.

Professor Marlene Schwartz discusses school meals in UConn Today.

Congratulations to Professor Charles Super and Professor Sara Harkness, who were awarded the APA Division 52’s 2022 Jean Lau Chin Award for Outstanding Psychologist in International Leadership Contributions!

Lecturer

Meg Galante-DeAngelis retired June 1, 2022 after 49 years as a member of the UConn community. From her first step onto campus to retirement, the University offered Meg the opportunity to follow the most elusive and wonderful of all dreams – to make a difference in the lives of others. Learning together with her students as they developed their passion for supporting each child to flourish as an individual has been a life’s work worth having.  The question she often asks is, “What if everybody understood child development?”
Always more comfortable being a worker bee rather than the queen, Meg has tried to be the best member of the HDFS community that she could be. Her gratitude to her colleagues and students, past and present, is immeasurable. Her special thanks to the teachers and administrators, past and present, at the UConn Child Development Labs are twofold.  She will be sustained by the wonder of days spent at the Child Labs in the company of children and will cherish the life-lasting gift of being seen and loved as individuals still enjoyed by her five children, all proud graduates of the Child Development Labs. Would that every child had this opportunity.

During her time at UConn, Meg was involved with the Child Labs in many ways – as undergraduate and graduate student, observer, learner and worker, in Infant/Toddler and Preschool Master Teacher positions, as Assistant Director/Program Coordinator, and as Faculty Advisor. Two of her proudest memories are working with Charlotte Madison to get the teachers at the Child Labs unionized and to design the CDL Infant Center. Meg has loved working with the other Early Childhood faculty who share her commitment to children. She is particularly interested in teacher preparation, advocacy for equity and social justice, quality care and education for infants and toddlers, and supporting first generation college students. She has taught every UConn Early Childhood Development and Education course. She and her colleagues help students develop active engagement in daily reflection and mindfulness that support best practice while recognizing self-care practices.  Meg was recently recognized for her excellence by two awards: the HDFS Faculty Teaching Award and the UConn-AAUP – Career Teaching Excellence Award.

Meg’s career afforded her the opportunity to be around the amazing young people who choose Human Development and Family Sciences as their major. One of her favorite stories is about a student who, on an interview, was told, “You are like a unicorn. I did not know that people with the kind of early childhood training you have existed in the real world.” Well, they do exist and they are out there making a difference in the lives of children and families every day.

In retirement, Meg plans to enjoy beauty and quiet on an island off the coast of Maine punctuated by visits from her gregarious and growing family. She looks forward to volunteering in her local community, hiking, doing genealogical and historical research, and perfecting 18^th and 19^th century cooking and other period crafting techniques.

Congratulations to Associate Professor Laura Donorfio, winner of the 2022 Clark Tibbitts Award from the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) and the Academy for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE). This award is given to an individual or organization that has made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of gerontology and/or geriatrics education.

Congratulations to Professor Lisa Eaton, winner of the CLAS 2022 Strategic Goal Award for Innovative Scholarship!

Professor

Marlene 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.

Instructor Cynthia Van Fleet is the winner of the CETL Award for Outstanding Adjunct! Cindy taught HDFS 1070 as a high school teacher for many years, and also teaches multiple classes for us in Waterbury and Hartford. Congratulations Cindy!