Recently, Professor and Department Head Eva Lefkowitz presented to the Early College Experience (ECE) HDFS 1070 course at Wilton High School, Eva’s own high school (class of 1986!).

Assistant Professor in Residence Terry Berthelot joined the United Services, Inc., Board of Directors on November 18, 2021. The purpose of the organization is to provide and encourage comprehensive human services, including behavioral health, social, and prevention services for towns in northeast Connecticut.

Professor Rebecca Puhl was among only six UConn faculty on the world’s highly cited research list.  Congratulations Rebecca!

Lecturer & Executive Director, UConn Child Development Laboratories

Anne Bladen has devoted her life to families and children in one way or another for the entirety of her career. After graduating with a BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College, Anne moved to Connecticut and worked in Willimantic for three years as a bilingual Welfare Caseworker with the Town of Windham Social Services.  The timing of her work as a caseworker overlapped with the AIDS and burgeoning Opiod epidemics, the recession, and the gutting of social services and job training programs. After several of her clients died of drug overdoses and AIDS, and as increasingly fewer individuals and families qualified for much needed benefits, Anne realized that it was time for a career change to work where she could have an impact much earlier on in people’s lives. As she explored how she might influence people earlier in the lifespan, Anne thought of her volunteer work with young children while in high school and college and applied to UConn’s Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates.

Anne completed her student teaching and MA placements in special education in public preschool programs in Hartford. Her MA thesis focused on the use of Alternative and Augmentative Communication with bilingual children with special needs.  These experiences solidified her belief in the power of early intervention.  Following her time in Hartford, Anne taught special education for preschoolers and their typically developing peers as well as resource room support for students in grades K-4.

Anne has been a member of the UConn Child Development Labs (CDL) community for 25 years. Having attended the Smith College Campus School for her own elementary years, the CDL’s mission of high quality education for children and college students was comfortable and welcoming when she became a kindergarten teacher at the CDL in 1996. She introduced the Writers’ Workshop model into the curriculum, building on her love of reading and writing.  Anne incorporated her passion for nature into her teaching of both children and UConn students as she hatched chickens, grew potatoes, built birdhouses and planted 2000 daffodils in the circle outside the Child Labs in celebration of the millennium.

Anne’s commitment to the wellbeing of young children led her to accept the role as Special Needs Coordinator at the Child Labs. While leaving the classroom as a teacher was a hard choice, she welcomed the opportunity to work with children, students, teachers and families in a different capacity. She was instrumental in combining ages to create a Preschool/ Kindergarten classroom. She supported teachers in meeting the individual needs of children and worked with other UConn departments to access resources for children and teachers.  At the same time, Anne became the instructor of two practicum classes at the CDL, allowing her to continue to help college students learn about the importance of the early years.

Anne moved into the role of Executive Director fifteen years ago, and continues to teach practicum classes, work with teachers, and support children.  Anne teaches her belief that all children should have access to high quality programs and that teachers should have the resources they need.  To this end, Anne has served in various community capacities during her career.  She chaired Mansfield Advocates for Children, coached and mentored several early childhood centers around the state in different stages of accreditation and helped them navigate the many facets of intentional teaching. Anne is an active member of NAACP and promotes understanding and diversity in both her professional and personal life.

Anne lives in an old house in the Mansfield Hollow Historic District and enjoys time at home with her daughter and two dogs. Her son is a 2019 UConn political science graduate who lives in Washington, DC. She is an avid gardener and quilter. You can find Anne outside in her gardens or at the river, hiking or exploring different biking trails.

Professor Marlene Schwartz was recently featured in several news articles in response to the FDA’s new guidance on cutting salt in food supply. Read the articles here: CNBC, NBC News, Infobae

Professor Rebecca Puhl was recently featured in several news articles discussing stigma related to Type 2 Diabetes. Read the articles here: Medical Xpress, Technology Times, Bariatric News

Associate Professor Ryan Watson featured in InCHIP Investigator Highlights.  Read the article here.

UConn Today featured Professor Rebecca Puhl’s multinational study examining policy remedies for weight discrimination. Read the article here.

Professor

Charlie Super learned early in life that people in different places behave differently. He grew up in suburban New Jersey, but spent many summers with his mother’s parents in rural Georgia. His father, though American-born, grew up in Europe; Charlie had his own taste of Europe as a teenager, when the family spent a year in Paris.

After undergraduate education in conventional psychology at Yale, and graduate training in developmental psychology at Harvard’s interdisciplinary Social Relations department, Charlie thought he knew a great deal about the development of American children, but was unsure how much of that was relevant to children in other places; he wanted to live and work for an extended period in someplace very different. In the meantime, he had discovered True Love. He and Sara Harkness were married not long before she needed to do field work for her doctorate in Anthropology. The cooperative exchange program between Harvard and the University of Nairobi offered a perfect opportunity for both of them. With support from the Carnegie and W. T. Grant foundations, Charlie and Sara moved to a farming community in western Kenya. They lived there for three years and started their family among the Kipsigis peoples of Kokwet.

Returning to the U.S. offered many opportunities, but not academic jobs. Cambridge proved a good base for research grants, short-term teaching, consulting, and raising children in an urban, family-friendly environment. It also offered a window to re-engage in applied work; a stint working for the 1970 White House Conference on Children during graduate school had sharpened Charlie’s understanding of the need for scientifically informed interventions, and the time in rural Kenya had only expanded on that. In these Cambridge years, he worked with two large intervention programs for infant and child health, in Bangladesh and in Colombia, and completed the necessary training for licensure as a child-clinical psychologist.

The Harkness-Super family moved to Penn State in 1988 when both Charlie and Sara were offered tenured positions, Charlie as Head of the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. In addition to initiation into academic administration and Land Grant values, central Pennsylvania also offered a remarkable clinical experience. State College, home to the university, is “centrally isolated”, as the locals say, smack in the middle of Appalachia. As the only doctoral-level child clinician in a four-county area, he saw a range of mental suffering and resilience unavailable in a Boston practice, everything from infant sleep problems to childhood dissociative identity disorder. There was also more field work during this period, this time in the Netherlands, and now as a family journey. It was a period of ethnographic discovery and intellectual adventure, setting the stage for a return visit four years later.

At the end of that second work in the Netherlands, Charlie and Sara accepted offers from the University of Connecticut. Charlie came as Dean of the School of Family Studies, and this presented an opportunity to advance his ideas on a culturally informed curriculum in the context of an institutional history that appreciated the interplay of theory and practice. For him, this combined the interdisciplinary vision of Social Relations and the use of knowledge exemplified in the Land Grant tradition. Over the next decade, HDFS became the largest undergraduate major at UConn, expanded to the Regional Campuses, began to weave culture and diversity into the fabric of its educational programs, eliminated cronyism in the faculty merit system, increased research funding six-fold and outside gifts ten-fold, founded the Family Studies Alumni Society and the Family Studies Advisory Board, and established two research and outreach Centers, a student Writing Center, HDFS’s own high-tech seminar room, the “Grad Lab,” and Lu’s Café. When the University reorganized in 2006, eliminating three Colleges, HDFS became a department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Charlie returned to the faculty.

Research and writing have always been a vital part of Charlie’s academic life; in 2009 he and Sara shared the inaugural award for Cultural and Contextual Factors in Child Development of the Society for Research in Child Development. Two contributions lie at the center of their contributions; first, the developmental niche framework, derived directly from the African work. This theoretical construct helps identify how “culture” shapes early development, including gross motor skills, sleep, play, emotions, language, responsibility, and intelligence.  The second contribution stems in part from the realization that theoretical understanding of parental ethnotheories – culturally shared beliefs and values about children and the family — was still weak. Research started in Cambridge came to fruition in the Dutch fieldwork and its sequel, the International Study of Parents Children and Schools, which explored variation within Europe and its diaspora, working with colleagues from sites in Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Australia, and the U.S. A further follow-up – the International Baby Study –advanced our understanding of how differences in the developmental niche in samples of U.S. and Dutch infants lead to dramatic differences in sleep (a two-hour difference at 6 months) and the related biology of arousal. A book specifically on parental ethnotheories (edited by Harkness and Super) brought the niche framework to a broad audience of developmentalists and psychological anthropologists. The concepts are now widely used in research on culture and child development.

The importance of action continues as a theme in Charlie’s academic and personal life. Through the Center for the Study of Culture, Health, and Human Development (which he co-directs), Charlie helps oversee the National Family Development Credential Program, a nation-wide training that annually certifies about 1,000 front-line family workers in supportive and empowerment skills. He is Principal Investigator on a series of contracts with the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood to provide evaluations of this and other interventions. On the leadership front, he has recently rotated off eight years of service on the U.S. National Committee for Psychological Science, organized by the National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences. In that role he co-organized two national conferences on the issues facing the discipline in a globalizing world. He continues to serve on the Credentials Committee for the International Union of Psychological Sciences.

Outside his professional life, Charlie chairs the Woodstock Democratic Town Committee, enjoys being a husband, father, and grandfather, and occasionally plays ragtime piano.

Associate Professor Beth Russell recently became the Co-Director of the UConn Collaboratory on School and Child Health. Learn more about Beth here.