Associate Professor Laura Donorfio was featured in the January issue of the AGHExchange in their Faculty Spotlight column. Laura was asked to share some of her key pedagogical considerations when teaching students about aging, how her approaches have changed over the years, and what advice she would give to new faculty teaching an aging course for the first time. (January 2022; 45(1).

Professor Sara Harkness was mentioned in a January 20 BBC reel on “How society pressures shape motherhood.” The reel featured an interview with CHHD Associate Director Saskia van Schaik, on Dutch parenting.

Professor

Kim Gans is a nutritionist and behavioral health researcher. She is primarily interested in intervention development and evaluation research in community-based settings to improve diet, physical activity and/or weight. The majority of her research has been with ethnic minority, low income and/or low literate populations. Much of her research includes multi-level 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. Another emphasis of her work is on translational research to study the dissemination of effective interventions to various community and clinical settings. Kim is also an expert in intervention mapping, a step-wise protocol for developing theory- and evidence-based health promotion programs and has collaborated on designing interventions for cytomegalovirus prevention, HPV vaccine promotion, violence prevention, and social isolation among others.

Kim has been interested in health for as long as she can remember.  She loved to watch medical shows on TV from a young age.  She began her college education as a first generation college student with an interest in medicine and majored in Biology as an undergraduate at Duke University. While there, she took an interdisciplinary course called Perspectives on Food and Hunger that excited her about nutrition and changed the trajectory of her career.  Instead of medical school, she decided to get an MPH degree in nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Public Health. Her first job after graduation was working for the WIC program at Health Center #6 in Philadelphia and then she joined the Pawtucket Heart Health Program, one of three NIH-funded community-based heart disease prevention projects in the US.  While working, she went back to school part-time at the University of Rhode Island to get her PhD 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 faculty in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at UConn.

Kim has served as a principal investigator, co-investigator, or faculty mentor on over 50 grants funded by NHLBI, NCI, NICHD, NINR, NIMHD, NIDDK, CDC, USDA, multiple foundations, and state agencies. She has published 120 peer reviewed articles and book chapters. She has also developed numerous educational materials, programs, and dietary assessment tools for the public and providers. Kim is an avid collaborator who enjoys creating multidisciplinary research teams, and a passionate mentor – serving as primary mentor for junior faculty on 4 K grants, 4 diversity supplements, and co-mentor on many more. She won the Institute for Collaboration in Health, Interventions and Policy (InCHIP) Faculty Mentoring award in 2020.

At the national level, Kim has been in leadership roles for the American Public Health Association, American Heart Association, International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, and Nutrition and Obesity Policy Research and Evaluation Network. She has been on the editorial board for two journals and served as a reviewer for 28 other journals. She also has reviewed multiple grant proposals for NIH, USDA, foundations and international federal agencies. Locally, she has been in leadership roles for the Multiple Sclerosis Society, RI Food Policy Council, and RI Hunger Elimination Task Force.  She also serves as Director of Community Engagement for Brown School of Public Health.

Outside of work, Kim enjoys spending time with her family and golden doodle Jasmine, reading books (she has been in the same book club since 1986), genealogy research, wine-tasting, crossword puzzles, connecting with her Mom Squad over good food and wine, and exercising, especially boxing and walks on the beach.

Professor Rebecca Puhl featured in a WBUR article: Do you need to be weighed every time you see a doctor? Read the article here.

Professor Preston Britner was featured in WalletHub’s recent piece about the Best States to Raise a Family. Read the article here.

Associate Professor Ryan Watson was quoted in an article about anti-trans legislation and its effects on mental health of LGBTQ+ youth. Read the article here.

Professor Rebecca Puhl was featured in a podcast on size discrimination. Listen to the podcast here.

Associate Professor Laura Mauldin published an op-ed essay in The American Prospect “The care crisis isn’t what you think”. Read the essay here.

Emeritus Professor Ron Rohner was featured in UConn Today for an article on parental rejection across cultures. Read the article here.

Associate Professor

Annamaria Csizmadia is a scholar-teacher of cultural diversity. She has spent the past two decades studying how culturally relevant and group-specific factors shape developmental processes among monoracial and Multiracial (including immigrant) youth of color. She investigates how youth of color develop a positive ethnic-racial identity and the role that families play in helping youth navigate life in a racialized society where access to resources and opportunities is determined based on one’s race (as well as class and gender). She has a special interest in Multiracial youth development (in part because she is the proud mother of a wonderfully brilliant Multiracial daughter).

Her work is Informed by cultural ecological, critical race, and intersectional theories. In this research she highlights the important role of family ethnic-racial socialization, such as how parents teach children pride in their race, ethnicity, and culture, and help them cope with bias and discrimination. Her research demonstrates that these socialization practices along with other culture-specific parenting behaviors contribute to social-emotional adjustment among youth of color in important ways. She also has found that how parents identify their child’s race is a highly salient form of ethnic-racial socialization in families of Multiracial youth. Her theoretical and empirical work emphasizes the dynamic interaction of family socialization, Multiracial youth’s social cognition, and their social environment that shapes Multiracial youth development.

Alongside family practices and youth’s identity-related social cognition, Annamaria seeks to understand how influences outside the family shape development in monoracial and Multiracial youth. Some of her most recent work focused on learning about racial microaggressions. In 2019-2020, as part of the UConn Racial Microaggression Study research team, she surveyed over 1,200 UConn students of color to learn about their experiences with racial microaggressions in and outside the classroom. The team found that students who reported more interpersonal experiences that communicated to them invalidation, insult, or derogatory messages due to their racial group also reported lower levels of psychological well-being and more discrimination-related trauma symptoms. The team presented their research to the University administration and disseminated it through campus news and the Hartford Courant to inform policy change and the community.

Annamaria began developing a keen interest in cultural diversity when she started taking Russian and German languages as an elementary-school student in Hungary where she was born and raised. Speaking other languages besides her native tongue exposed her to all kinds of cross-cultural experiences. She learned about life in different cultural settings from pen pals from Eastern and Western Europe (prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain!), summer camps that hosted students from Austria to Korea, and school trips abroad. Her informal learning through travel and cross-cultural exchange in time shifted to formalized learning about linguistics, culture, literature, and, in the end, diversity issues in human development. She did not only traverse cultures and national borders, but eventually also disciplinary boundaries. After studying “Germanistik” and “Anglistik (German for German and English literature and linguistics) at the University of Trier, followed by a master’s degree in German Literature, in 2008 she completed her Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Missouri.

In addition to her research, Annamaria feels privileged to learn about cultural diversity through daily interactions with her students at the UConn Stamford campus where she teaches courses on diversity issues, intergroup relations, research methods, and other HDFS topics. As a scholar-teacher, she regularly engages students in her research. Over the years, she has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries with her students and taken them to national conferences to present their work.

For her teaching excellence and commitment to student success, Annamaria has received several honors and awards, including the 2013-2014 Honors Mentor of the Year Award, 2019-2020 Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Teaching Fellow Award, and the 2020 College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award. Although these recognitions mean a lot to Annamaria, she is most proud of her students who secured competitive funding to do their research under her mentorship and went on to pursue graduate training at UConn, Harvard, and many other prestigious universities. As a first-generation college student and immigrant, herself, providing access to opportunities and resources for her students, many of whom are also first-generation college students and of immigrant backgrounds, is the most fulfilling part of her job!

Annamaria also serves her professional community as an editorial board member of the Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Family Psychology, and Journal of Research on Adolescence, and as a peer reviewer for two dozen journals, ad hoc conferences, and funding agencies. As member of the board, advisory council, and now Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee, she has been supporting the work of the Stamford Public Education Foundation, a local educational non-profit since 2008.

Outside work, Annamaria loves traveling, reading, running long distances, Barre and HITT workouts, doing puzzles, home renovation, gardening, and spending time with her daughter, family, and friends. She lives in Stamford, CT where she feels right at home given that over 35% of the city’s population is foreign born.