Faculty

FS Undergrad Council hosts Social Sciences Career Night

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On March 28th, the Family Sciences Undergraduate Council hosted a Social Sciences Career Night event.  Ten career experts offered their time to 70 UConn students.  The career experts included representatives from the fields of Marriage and Family (Emberleigh Luce, Jill Donohoue, Jennifer Anderson), advising (Kristin Van Ness ‘09 BA, ‘14 MA), entrepreneurship in real estate (Cheryl Hilton, ’91 HDFS), Early Childhood Education (Nancy Walsh), Career Development/Higher Education (Lisa Famularo), School Counseling (Wheeler Deangelis, ‘15), Social Work (Ashley Dyer ‘19), and the Juvenile Justine Judicial Branch (Catherine Foley, ’92 HDFS).

Many of the career experts that participated were UConn HDFS alumni—professionally, products the career experts have become widely recognized and accredited by the state of Connecticut, published novels, and have taught their own classes.  Thanks to Ryan Watson, the faculty advisor, who helped the FSUC members organize the event!

Marlene Schwartz, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, May 2022

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Professor

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.

Edna Brown, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, April 2022

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Associate Professor

Edna BrownDr. Edna Brown has a background in developmental psychology, sociology, and social work with an interdisciplinary approach to research. She earned a Joint Doctorate in Developmental Psychology and Social Work from the University of Michigan. During her graduate career, she engaged in research endeavors at the Institute for Social Research and was a member of the Life Course Development Program and the Program for Research on Black Americans.

Dr. Brown’s research focuses on the impact of stressful life transitions on health and wellbeing during middle and later adulthood. Coping with relationship breakups and coping with illness are two major life transitions that affect a large percentage of our adult population. Using life course theories, she examines how social contexts (i.e., gender, social class, family configurations, social relations) and cultural contexts (i.e., race, ethnicity, religion), affect coping, health, and wellbeing during normative and non-normative life transitions, particularly among Black Americans. These social and cultural contexts provide meaning and substance for interpreting research findings. Dr. Brown also considers the factors that influence Black Americans’ health promoting behaviors and the development of health promoting interventions to reduce health disparities. An interdisciplinary theoretical framework permits her to provide practical implications that address societal concerns. She has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and presented at many national and international scholarly conferences on health and aging. Several of her publications and conference presentation were co-authored by graduate students. Dr. Brown is a fierce advocate for graduate students and has enjoyed including them in her research endeavors.

Dr. Brown’s interest in aging and health was further inspired when she and her son lived in Accra, Ghana in West Africa. She worked for the United Nations HelpAge Ghana project providing health, housing, and employment services for older adults across Ghana. While there she had the opportunity to visit several West African regions and quickly recognized many of the cultural traditions practiced among Black Americans. The similarities provided her an insight into the historical contexts and reasons for many of the traditions and how they were modified to promote healthy development among Black Americans.

Dr. Brown’s teaching incorporates her knowledge and passion about culture and diversity and about healthy aging. She has taught Diversity in HDFS every semester since 2007 and frequently teaches Adulthood and Aging. These classes help students to open their minds to the diversity among them, dispel negative stereotypes about people unlike themselves, and recognize that development continues past adolescence.

Dr. Brown has served her professional community in several ways. She served on the University’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion Advisory Committee, the Vice Provost COVID-Focused Work Balance Task Force, and the General Education Oversight Committee (GEOC) Content Area 4 Diversity and Multiculturalism. She is a faculty affiliate and serves on the advisory Boards of Africana Institute. Dr. Brown has served as a peer reviewer for several academic journals and conferences, and has been invited to serve on the editorial board for the Journal of Marriage and Family. One of her most challenging but rewarding roles was as Associate Department Head for Graduate Studies. The position gave her an opportunity to sensitively serve and mentor graduate students as they were making critical decisions about their professional development.

Dr. Brown has served her home community in various positions. From 2014-2017 she was appointed to the African American Affairs Commission by Connecticut House Majority Leader Joseph Aresimowicz. The committee served as advisors to CT policy makers about the unmet needs of African American constituents. She also served on the Board of Directors for Rockville Public Library, Vernon-Rockville CT from 2014-2018.

When not working, Edna enjoys strength training, walking, spinning, and dancing. She loved travelling to Caribbean, Central and South American countries to learn about different cultures, traditions, foods, and indigenous religions.

As of June 2022 Edna, will retire from UConn to enjoy traveling again. Another retirement goal is to work with elementary school children in underfunded public schools in vulnerable neighborhoods in her hometown, New York City. She hopes to expose these students to higher education opportunities beginning at a young age.