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.