The Office of the Vice President for Research announced the recipients of the Scholarship Facilitation Fund (SFF) Awards for Fall 2016.  Assistant Professors Alaina Brenick and Linda Halgunseth were among the awardees.

Alaina Brenick was awarded funds to support her study of the “Unique Experiences of, Consequences of, and Effective Responses to Discriminatory Bullying of Latino Immigrant Youth.”

LindaHalgunseth’s award is for the study of the “Examining the Effectiveness of Immigrant Parents’ Responses to their Children’s Bullying Experiences in Middle School.”

Both of these studies are great examples of the important translational scholarship being conducted by members of the HDFS program.

Professor Rebecca Puhl is featured in a New York Times article entitled, Parents Should Avoid Comments on a Child’s Weight, June 16, 2016.

The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, First Year Experience Program & Learning Communities, and the Honors Program are pleased to announce their awardees for their excellence in teaching and advising awards.  Assistant Professor Alaina Brenick received the Honors Faculty Member of the Year- 2016 award.  The recognition dinner was held on April 26th.

HDFS’ Professor Steven Wisensale has been named a Fulbright Scholar to Japan for the Spring 2017 term. He will be assigned to Kyoritsu Women’s University (Tokyo) and Yokohama City University (40 miles outside Tokyo) where he will teach two courses: “Family Policy in Aging Societies” and “Baseball Diplomacy in Japanese-U.S. Relations.”

Professor Laura Mauldin has published a book titled “Made To Hear.” The book is based on an ethnography of a cochlear implant (CI) clinic and examines the use of CIs in deaf children, the role of neuroscience in the culture of intervention around deafness, and how mothers are expected to adopt CIs for their deaf child. Published by the University of Minnesota Press (2016).

UConn study led by Rebecca Puhl, Deputy Director of Rudd Center for Food Policy was published in “The Milbank Quarterly”, in an article entitled, People Have Kinder Attitudes Toward Workplace Weight Discrimination Than You Might Expect, in New York Magazine, December 2, 2015.

Marlene Schwartz, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity and professor of Human Development and Family Studies is quoted in an article entitled Why Poverty May Be More Relevant Than Race For Childhood Obesity.  NPR, January 22, 2016.

Professor Rebecca Puhl, along with her Co-PI Dianne Quinn from the Department of Psychology, received a 2015 Research Excellence Program (REP) award. The primary goal of the REP is to provide seed funding to promote, support, and enhance the research, scholarship, and creative endeavors of faculty at UConn, including (but not limited to) the strategic and emerging areas delineated in the Academic Plan and national and global priorities.

Dr. Puhl’s grant will examine factors that help or hurt weight loss maintenance, with a specific focus on the role of experienced and internalized stigma. Rebecca and Diane plan to use the results from this study as pilot evidence to apply for larger NIH funding.