Associate Professor Laura Mauldin has a new blog post out with the national organization, Caring Across Generations. “If he gets COVID, it’s over”: I talked to spousal caregivers during Covid, here’s what I learned”. Read the blog here.

Associate Professor Laura Donorfio and her son, Adam, were featured in an article, The Year in Drag: 2020’s Fiercest Moments from the World’s Greatest Queens, for their appearance on the TLC show Dragnificent!  In the article, they describe their episode as “The standout storyline from the season.”

Laura was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor effective August, 2020!

 

Dr. Laura Mauldin is a feminist sociologist interested in thinking about how disability operates as a social category and axis of inequality alongside and intersecting with race, class, and gender. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of medical sociology, science and technology studies, and disability studies.  Most of her work is focused on understanding social meanings of disability and the effects of medical knowledge and medicalization on our lives, particularly how we think about various conditions (such as deafness) and what “good care” in the context of disability or chronic illness means.

Dr. Mauldin’s first book was an ethnographic study of parents obtaining a cochlear implant for their deaf child. After this, she published a variety of other qualitative studies looking at such things as the caregiving experiences of sibling of people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, disparities in outcomes of pediatric cochlear implantation, and life histories of Deaf and queer people, among others. The thread through all of these projects is a critical examination of disability and the social consequences experienced by disabled people because of a culture that devalues it.

Her current book project is a study of spousal caregiving and the lack of care infrastructure in the US. The study, funded by the Social Science Research Council, also includes a look at how COVID-19 is impacting spousal caregivers and their partners.  She has interviewed nearly 50 people across 22 states. These conversations are also sparking ideas about how creative and generative people are in caregiving; repurposing household objects and rigging medical technologies to meet their own needs. Part of her online methodology is asking for photos of caregiving objects and she’s working on creating an archive to document these ingenuities.

Dr. Mauldin lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her partner and toddler. She likes birding, eating coconut buns in Chinatown, and has just begun a knitting class. She is also a former spousal caregiver and a nationally certified American Sign Language interpreter.

Assistant Professor Na Zhang‘s research article, “Trait mindfulness and anger in the family: A dyadic analysis of male service members and their female partners,” was one of the finalists among over 700 articles that were evaluated for the 2020 Barbara Thompson Award for Excellence in Research on Military and Veteran Families. Read more about the award.

The National Business Group on Health interviewed Professor Rebecca Puhl about her work in a recent podcast. Listen to the podcast here.

Professor

Dr. Lisa Eaton is a social and behavioral health scholar. She is primarily interested in social determinants of disease – or all of the factors that influence health outside of the biological mechanisms of health. Her work focuses primarily on the multi-level impact of stigma on general health and well-being, including linkage, access, and retention in healthcare. Her most recent work has focused on how systematic changes in providing health care can impact and improve health related outcomes. She is primarily interested in how one’s environment creates barriers or facilitates accessing health care and how these factors impact overall health outcomes. And further, how interventions can be implemented in these contexts to affect change in one’s environment. Her work has primarily involved populations who have been historically marginalized, or populations that face considerable health inequities.

Dr. Eaton began her work with an interest in global health. She was fortunate to gain experience in research involving marginalized populations in South Africa, where she gained expertise in conducting multi-level interventions with substance using populations residing in townships. This work led to her interest in working in maternal health, in particular, working with women who continue to use substances throughout their pregnancies. Dr. Eaton focused on ways to impact access to pregnancy testing and systems level interventions to provide support for women throughout their pregnancy and initial years of child rearing. Around this time, Dr. Eaton also became more involved in domestic work with racial/ethnic and sexual orientation minority populations in the southeastern US. Her work became primarily focused on understanding social determinants of accessing health care, and bridging the divide between medical advances and actual access to medical advances. This work has included a considerable focus on the role of social and structural stigmas as barriers to care. The National Institutes of Health have funded Dr. Eaton’s work in these areas.

Dr. Eaton’s career trajectory began having received her degrees from the University of Connecticut and postdoctoral training at Yale University. Dr. Eaton is grateful to the multiple professors and mentors who have taken their time to provide her with mentorship and hopes to continue to pay this forward as her career evolves.

Assistant Professor in Residence Vida Samuel was awarded the 2020 LiveGirl Board Member Impact Award for guiding the Junior League of Stamford-Norwalk LiveGirl League’s community impact projects and facilitating conversations on race and gender for high school and college students.

Associate Professor Linda Halgunseth discusses COVID burnout among parents in Vox (Read the article here)

Assistant Professor in Residence

Brian has worked at UConn since the 1990s in a variety of capacities. He has learned about many aspects of the University through his work at nearly all UConn Campuses including UConn Health. Brian states, “UConn runs through my heart and soul; I have worked on all campuses with the exception of the Law School.” One of Brian’s longest and most rewarding experiences was as founding Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UConn. He led building the program and brought in $1.6 million to the University. The institute attracted over 800 students (ages 50-98) and offered well over 100 courses and special programs annually. The program also provided work and internship experiences for undergraduate and graduate students.

Brian has taught in HDFS for ten years, at the UConn Hartford, Stamford, Storrs, Torrington, and Waterbury campuses. He has regularly taught Gender and Aging (HDFS 3249) and Diversity Issues (HDFS 2001) and teaches many other aging and lifespan courses. Brian believes that one of the cornerstones of human development is absorbing the richness of human diversity and examining the lives of older adults to help students understand the continuum of human development. Brian is passionate about quality of life issues for women, racial and ethnic minorities, and sexual and gender minorities.

“Community engagement is in many ways the hallmark of my career at UConn,” Brian states. He served on many boards in Waterbury over a ten-year period in areas related to community improvement including arts and culture, economic development, children and families, education, hunger, and other needs. Brian is the recipient of the 2019 Provost’s Award, Excellence in Outreach & Public Engagement and the 2015 Waterbury Neighborhood Council. Brian served as the Director of Outreach, UConn Waterbury and a member of the Public Engagement Forum for ten years.

Brian has presented publicly and published on topics of aging, intergenerational programming, and student development. He led aspects of a summer medical research program for high school students at UConn Health. Brian co-edited a serial publication on the topic of dual/concurrent enrollment and conducted a national study on the topic of minority faculty recruitment. Currently, he is a co-PI on a study that integrates his interests in aging and human diversity entitled, “Drag Expression and how it interfaces with Dragism, Coping, Resilience, and Generativity.”

Brian enjoys spending time in Arizona and on Cape Cod. He is a dedicated fan of New York City Cabaret Clubs (deeply missed during this pandemic). One of his “pinch yourself moments” was spending a New Year’s Eve with Eartha Kitt and seventy-five others in New York City.