Faculty

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.

Kevin Ferreira van Leer featured on the ¿Qué pasa, HSIs? podcast

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Kevin Ferreira van LeerThe Using Our Voices to Transform Hispanic Serving Institutions project, of which Assistant Professor Kevin Ferreira van Leer is a Co-PI, was featured on the ¿Qué pasa, HSIs? podcast with Dr. Gina Garcia. The podcast episode is entitled Sac State Using Student Voices to Transform HSIs and is available to stream now and you can listen to it here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/74KCuJQ4jKnEfg5cI0qW32. The episode features the two faculty PIs and two student co-researchers. It provides an overview of the mixed methods, participatory action research project at California State University, Sacramento (Sac State) which explores Latine student perceptions of “servingness” at Sac State and aims to interrogate how university policies, programs, and practices support Latine student success.

Lisa Eaton, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, May 2024

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Lisa EatonLisa began working in the HDFS department in August of 2012. She had previously worked at Yale University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS and received her bachelor’s and PhD degrees from UConn. Lisa initially worked at UConn Hartford where she enjoyed working with many first generation and non-traditional students, but transitioned to UConn Storrs when she took the role of Co-Director of the NIMH supported T32 training program Social Processes of HIV/AIDS. In this role she mentored numerous graduate students in programs across UConn in social aspects of disease prevention and treatment. Serving in this role has been one of her most rewarding experiences at UConn. Lisa has also served as the Co-Director of the Southeast HIV/AIDS Research and Evaluation (SHARE) Project for 13 years and counting, where she has conducted both qualitative and quantitative research studies to develop programs that seek to address gaps in health care access among populations impacted by concerns related to health care injustice. In this time, she has served as PI or Co-I on 15 R01s, an R21, and an R34 funded by National Institutes of Health. Programs developed by Lisa and her team have been evaluated by and incorporated into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Compendium of Evidence Based Practice – a program that facilitates the promotion and uptake of community-based programs to address disease prevention and treatment. Lisa also serves as Co-Director of UConn’s Sexuality, Health, and Intersectional Experiences (SHInE) Lab where her work focuses on understanding health disparities among sexual and gender diverse youth and adults. Multiple HDFS graduate students are involved and contribute to the mission of both the SHARE Project and SHInE Lab.

In her spare time, Lisa serves as a ride share driver for her two children. She eagerly carts them around to soccer, softball, lacrosse, basketball, skiing, snowboarding, drama, this friend’s house, and that friend’s house all while only hoping for a five-star review in return (of course, no tip!). She also works hard to support her dog’s posh lifestyle of perfectly timing his naps to align with the sun and being hand fed his meals.