Professor Rebecca Puhl featured in an article in The Atlantic about using people first language when discussing obesity Read the article here https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/06/person-with-obesity-language-phrasing/678584/
Faculty
Sara Harkness, HDFS Faculty Spotlight, July 2024
Sara 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).
Keith Bellizzi interviewed for FastCompany story
FastCompany, the world’s leading business media brand, interviewed Professor Keith Bellizzi for a story “Do presidential debates change anyone’s minds? What the research says as Biden and Trump face off”. https://www.fastcompany.com/91146960/presidential-debate-biden-trump
Marlene Schwartz featured in UConn Today
Professor Marlene Schwartz was featured in UConn Today for a partnership with East Hartford public schools. Read the article here https://today.uconn.edu/2024/05/uconn-partnership-with-east-hartford-public-schools-celebrates-first-year/
Rebecca Puhl featured in multiple articles
Professor Rebecca Puhl was featured in an article about Ozempic in Town & Country. Read the article here.
She was also featured in an article about obesity and childhood bullying in Saigon Nho (Read the article here), and in a Perth Now article about why on-screen villains and buffoons are frequently obese. Read the Perh Now article here.
Ron Rohner and Sumbleen Ali featured in UConn Today article


Ronald Rohner and Sumbleem Ali (’21 PhD) were featured in a UConn Today article about their work on parental acceptance: https://today.uconn.edu/2024/05/relationship-study-says-parental-acceptance-in-childhood-predicts-ability-to-forgive-as-adults/
Csizmadia- Alumni Faculty Excellence Award in Undergraduate Teaching
Congratulations to Annamaria Csizmadia, the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alumni Faculty Excellence Award in Undergraduate Teaching! The Alumni Faculty Excellence in Teaching Awards are designed to honor those who not only deliver exemplary instruction but also foster an engaging and transformative learning environment.
Kari Adamsons-Alumni Faculty Excellence Award in Graduate Teaching
Congratulations 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
HDFS faculty and grad students present at ISSBD Conference
HDFS faculty and graduate students will be presenting at the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development (ISSBD) conference this June in Lisbon, Portugal. Find the full list here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1krHhezJHNnCLEvXZD_jFbiG9iqYWHhn4t03mYPca1_U/edit#gid=0