Beth was promoted to Professor effective August, 2024!

Beth Russell has spent 20 years studying psychological distress and how people manage it. Her studies examine how individuals and families respond to stress across a range of typical life events (like the transition to parenthood) and atypical experiences (caregiving in the context of chronic health conditions). Her most recent work examines the multi-level influences that shape people’s responses to stress, spanning individual, social, and place-based factors over time. She is currently on several teams funded by both internal and external awards to develop and test interventions that target the regulation of distress to improve psychosocial outcomes.

Families are a primary source of support during times of stress. Much of the modeling close loved ones provide about how to manage challenges is shaped by attitudes about stress and the coping behaviors that might (or might not) be useful in a given situation. The range of supports to cope with stress extend far beyond family influences to include informal supports like friends/peers, and formal supports including help-seeking through treatment providers. Beth’s work across different stressful situations demonstrates that there are subgroup patterns in help-seeking which ultimately impact coping strategies. For example, young men tend to be strikingly absent from clinical trials and community-based service provision, indicating meaningful gaps in our understanding of help-seeking in times of stress. Describing the unique distress and resilience trajectories among subgroups at heightened risk for mental health struggles is an important step in tailoring accessible and equitable interventions for those with the greatest needs. Beth and her HDFS colleague Kari Adamsons won the National Council on Family Relations 2024 Men in Families Focus Group Best Research Paper Award for their coauthored work “Longitudinal transmission of risk behaviors between mothers, fathers, and adolescents” published in the Journal of Family Psychology.

Beth became the Director of the Center for Applied Research in Human Development (CARHD) in 2018, where she has over a decade of experience directing evaluations of human service programs that provide supports to disadvantaged communities, helping programs identify what works best for whom within their client populations. Beth also holds two editorial board member seats for the journals New Directions for Evaluation and Child Psychiatry and Human Development.

Outside of work, Beth spends time with her family, in her gardens and art studio, and connecting with friends over good food. Three generations of her family love coming together from around the country to travel to the best beaches, jungles, waterfalls, and caves every summer – next up in 2025: SCUBA diving a Pacific Island volcano crater!

Sarah Rendón-García collaborated and is featured in the short-form documentary “Invisible Wounds: Unveiling Migration Trauma.” Directed by Oscar Guerra, an Associate Professor of Film and Video Production at UConn, this documentary recently premiered on PBS. You can watch it here (https://www.pbs.org/video/invisible-wounds-6zwok9/).

Graduate student Vanessa Esquivel (mentee of Caitlin Lombardi), received the 2024 Early Care and Education Research Scholars: Head Start Dissertation Grant from the OPRE of ACF to support her dissertation research, Investigating Parent-provider Relationships In Early Head Start Among Latine Families: An Integrative Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods Study. She is the first UConn student to be awarded this highly competitive federal grant, which will support her work of building a comprehensive understanding of parent-provider relationships among Latine families and informing future policy and program efforts of Early Head Start and the broader field of Early Care and Education. This is a two-year award totaling $50,000. Congratulations Vanessa!

John Oliver recently cited a study that Professor Marlene Schwartz co-authored on the “Last Week Tonight” segment about school lunches. Watch the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YypArYDcjA

Kyla is HDFS Assistant Professor in Residence and Coordinator of the Early Childhood Specialization (ECS) at UConn Stamford. Her graduate background includes both research and teaching, with a particular focus on how young children develop the crucial socioemotional skill of self-regulation and how teachers and families can promote this ability. She recently joined UConn in pursuit of a translational position where she could bridge research and practice by making evidence-based information accessible to the early childhood educators of tomorrow. In her dual role as assistant professor and program coordinator, she teaches undergraduate HDFS courses, promotes the ECS to interested students, and works closely with the Community Child Development Center (CCDC) in Westport to bring her students into high-quality preschool classrooms and guide their work.

Kyla’s journey to UConn began with her neuroscience major at UMass Amherst, where she became interested in executive function in both animals and children. After college, she obtained a full-time position as a research project manager at Michigan State University’s Early Language and Literacy Investigations Lab, which led her to sharpen her focus toward self-regulation in preschoolers. She was invited to apply to graduate school in the MSU HDFS program, where she completed her Masters and PhD degrees while serving as a research assistant across four grants, a teaching assistant, and an instructor. For the final two years of her PhD, Kyla also worked as a full-time Associate Teacher in the NAEYC-accredited MSU Child Development Lab preschools, where she used best practice approaches, developed curriculum plans, and guided undergraduate students during their practicum hours. Kyla has conducted professional development workshops for in-service and pre-service teachers and has published both research and practitioner papers on early childhood development, most notably for NAEYC’s major practitioner journal Young Children.

Alongside her faculty work, Kyla is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer and Certified Control Unleashed Instructor specializing in working with families who have recently acquired puppies. Kyla has been training dogs professionally for over 15 years and uses force-free, science-based approaches such as clicker training in private sessions and group classes, as well as raising and training dogs for service organizations like Paws with a Cause and Leader Dogs for the Blind.

When she is not teaching students or training dogs, Kyla enjoys hiking on local trails with her Golden Retriever, Jahi. She also likes psychological thrillers (books or movies), the outdoors, parenting podcasts or audiobooks, coffee/tea with friends, and spending time with her family on summer boating adventures.

Congratulations to Jolaade Kalinowski, who recently received a 5-year K01 Mentored Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health for a project titled Proof of Concept Trial of a Mindful Walking Intervention for Black Women with Hypertension!