Faculty

Sara Harkness, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, July 2024

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Sara HarknessSara Harkness has always been fascinated by other languages and cultures, and how culture shapes human development and families. She has lived, studied, and worked in many different cultural places including Sweden, Colombia, Guatemala, Kenya, and The Netherlands, and has collaborated on research with colleagues in Italy, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, Poland, Australia, and Korea. Sara’s first research project, as a doctoral student in social anthropology at Harvard, was a study of children’s acquisition of basic color terms in two different language communities in Guatemala, one Spanish-speaking and the other Mam (a Mayan language) (Harkness, 1973). At Harvard, Sara met and married the love of her life, Charlie Super, and together they travelled to Kenya where for the next three years they carried out research on children and families in a rural Kipsigis village. This work led to the formulation of the “developmental niche” framework for studying the cultural construction of children’s development (Super & Harkness, 1986).

Informed by this framework and its further elaboration in “parental ethnotheories,” Sara and Charlie, together with colleagues in The Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Australia, and the U.S. carried out research, supported by the Spencer Foundation, on parenting and children’s development in Western societies, with a particular focus on home-school relations (Harkness et al., 2007). Subsequent studies, supported in part by NIH, have explored cultural patterns in regulation of state of arousal in infants and their mothers in The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Korea, and the U.S. as measured by salivary cortisol (Super, 2011).

Since 1996, Sara has served as professor in HDFS and Pediatrics, and Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Health, and Human Development (CHHD). The CHHD’s Graduate Certificate program has provided research training for students in five departments; four CHHD students presented their projects at the June 2024 meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development. Through the CHHD, UConn has established relationships with Radboud University (The Netherlands), and the University of Botswana, including an online exchange program for graduate students. The CHHD has also partnered since 2000 with the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood (OEC); the latest 3-year contract includes research on racial/ethnic disparities in perinatal health, and the development of a new program to train home visitors in the use of temperament assessments and tips for parents.

In addition to her work at UConn, Sara spent 2012-2013 in Washington D.C. as a Jefferson Science Fellow, working as a Senior Advisor in Education and Health in the Latin American and Caribbean Bureau of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Sara and Charlie’s work has been jointly recognized by an award from the Society for Research in Child Development for “Distinguished contributions to cultural and contextual factors in child development” (2009), and by Division 52 of the American Psychological Association’s Jean Lau Chin Award for Outstanding Psychologist in International Leadership Contributions (2022).

Kari Adamsons-Alumni Faculty Excellence Award in Graduate Teaching

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Kari AdamsonsCongratulations to Kari Adamsons, the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alumni Faculty Excellence Award in Graduate Teaching! The Alumni Faculty Excellence Awards are among the highest honors bestowed by the University of Connecticut. Recipients must have a distinguished record of sustained excellence and must have been part of the UConn faculty for at least 10 years.

Na Zhang, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, June 2024

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Na ZhangDr. Na Zhang is a prevention researcher, family scholar, and mindfulness teacher. At the center of her work is the intersection of mindfulness and parenting research. She is interested in understanding the biopsychosocial determinants of parenting behaviors and evaluating parenting interventions’ effects on improving parents’ and children’s mental health, processes of change, and implementation. Traditional parent training programs have focused on teaching parents about the “doing”, the outer parental behaviors, but she is interested in the inner work of parenting – which speaks to the “being”, or parents’ own self-regulation broadly, and mindfulness specifically – and their integration. In Na’s work she argues that integrating mindfulness training to existing evidence-based parent training programs is an innovative approach with potentials to optimize program outcomes in many ways. She is now developing a mindfulness app to enhance an evidence-based parenting program for divorced parents. The work is funded by a career development award from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Na studied at Tsinghua University before coming to the United States as an international student – this year marks her 10th year anniversary. During her PhD study at the University of Minnesota and postdoctoral training at Arizona State University, she studied the design, evaluation, and implementation of parenting interventions across stressful family contexts such as post-deployed military families and parentally bereaved families.

At UConn Na has so far taught undergraduate courses at the Stamford campus and is looking forward to teaching a graduate course soon. She directs a team of graduate and undergraduate student researchers in her Family Resilience and Mindfulness Empowerment (FRAME) lab. Recently she received a mentorship award from the UConn Office of Undergraduate Research.

Na is a qualified/Level 1 Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teacher trained via Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, and in the final phase to become a certified/Level 2 teacher. She enjoys teaching MBSR and learns as much from her participants as they learn from her.