Rashel Marrero

Rashel  Oliva Marrero is a dedicated HDFS major at UConn Stamford. During her time as an undergraduate student, she has embodied a passion for supporting and nurturing others at every stage of life. Rashel is committed to a holistic understanding of human well-being and is pursuing a dual degree in Public Administration, maintaining a strong GPA of 3.8. She aims to apply her studies in human development, equity, and leadership toward policy, communication, and community empowerment.

Rashel’s interest in leadership and public engagement has been deepened by her internships. Most notably, she completed an internship with The Campaign School at Yale Law School (TCSYale), a nonpartisan, issue-neutral training program whose mission is to increase the number and influence of women in elected and appointed office. Through this experience, Rashel gained firsthand insight into the intersection of gender equity, civic participation, and institutional leadership. In addition, she served as a Social Media Intern for different religious organizations, where she developed skills in content strategy, audience engagement, and digital storytelling. These roles allowed her to explore how to leverage online platforms for community impact, advocacy, and public education.

As she approaches graduation, Rashel continues to seek opportunities that integrate her academic training with her passion for building equitable systems, effective communication, and inclusive leadership.

Lydia O Nyarko is a first-year HDFS master’s student working with Dr. Jolaade Kalinowski. Lydia earned her UConn BA in Global Health and Society with a minor in HDFS. As an undergraduate student, she explored health disparities and health equity. She became passionate about child health and community influences on child development. Lydia received a scholarship from the Hurley Gurley Foundation that funded her passion project titled Amplifying the voices of the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) community in Ghana.

As a graduate student, Lydia works with Dr. Kalinowski as a research assistant on her Stress Lab Project. Currently, Lydia is exploring mental health-seeking behaviors among women of color and young adults. She plans on applying multidisciplinary frameworks to inform mental health interventions, particularly for immigrant families. After completing her master’s, Lydia hopes to pursue a PhD in HDFS.

Lydia grew up in Ghana before moving to the US. While an undergraduate student, she studied abroad three times. Her longterm goal is to visit all the countries in the world. She enjoys vlogging her life.

Chizzy is an HDFS PhD student who first joined the program in 2023. He was born in Southeastern Nigeria and holds a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, a medical degree from Igbinedion University, and a master’s degree in HDFS from the UConn. Before coming to UConn, Chizzy worked as a general medical practitioner in Nigeria and as a clinical instructor at St. George’s University School of Medicine, Grenada.

Chizzy’s interest in gerontology can be traced to his time working as a medical practitioner. During his clinical encounters with older patients, he often found these patients’ problems unique and misunderstood. These, plus an eagerness to work with his UConn advisor, Dr. Candi Nwakasi, drew him to UConn. His research centers focuses on psychosocial and sociocultural drivers of health, with a particular emphasis on cancer survivorship and cognitive health. As an aspiring academic, Chizzy hopes to champion efforts to modify the curriculum in the medical, allied, and other affiliated health sciences, toward an acceptance and normalization of a healthcare delivery model that is holistic and caters to the needs of all people irrespective of their age bracket.

Chizzy loves sports, mainly soccer and track and field events. He also enjoys watching TV shows, cooking, and gardening.

Angel Reed is a first-year PhD student working with Dr. Eva Lefkowitz, specializing in romantic relationships (specifically queer relationships). In Spring 2025, they graduated summa cum laude from the University of Alabama (UA) with a B.S. in Human Development and Psychology. As an undergraduate, they became passionate about researching romantic relationships and the various factors that encourage or discourage relationship success. Angel’s undergraduate thesis focused on plurisexual individuals (people attracted to multiple genders), and how different perceptions of their relationships are associated with their satisfaction. They presented this research at the UA Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Conference (URCA). Additionally, although Angel’s focus is romantic relationships, they have a strong interest in child development and positive parenting. They presented a project concerning children’s trust when learning and decision-making at both URCA and at the 2024 Cognitive Development Society Conference in Pasadena, CA.

Angel has an in-press article at the UA Journal of Science and Health, and is working on two other soon-to-be-submitted manuscripts. They continue to collaborate on three other projects at UA remotely from Connecticut. At UConn, they plan to build upon the ideas in their undergraduate thesis, and study how one’s views about their relationship are associated with their personal happiness and relationship satisfaction. They are especially interested in the power of perception over reality, and plan to examine how perceptions of one’s relationship differ when comparing self-perceptions to perceptions of individuals outside the relationship (and whether these differences impact relationship success). Angel’s long-term goal is to become a university professor and continue their research, including establishing a lab where they can introduce undergraduates to research.

Angel grew up in Los Angeles before moving to Alabama and looks forward to experiencing New England with their fiancé. In their free time, Angel enjoys going to the movies, playing video games, petting their tuxedo cat, Enyo, and collecting vintage oddities to decorate their apartment.

Yuyang Hu completed his PhD in Spring 2025. He started his academic journey as an undergraduate student majoring in law with a minor in applied psychology. He learned that he did not want to work as a prosecutor, judge, or lawyer, as most of his schoolmates did. Instead, he was attracted by the human mind and mental well-being and wanted to learn more about them. He switched his focus and earned a master’s degree in psychology at University of Memphis and a master’s degree in educational psychology at University of Virginia. During this period, he realized he was fascinated by family dynamics and chose to focus his efforts on family sciences when applying to PhD programs. He eventually entered UConn HDFS and worked with Dr. Beth Russell.

Yuyang had a clear intention to pursue a job in academia in China since his first day at UConn. To prepare for this goal, he accumulated valuable experience in research and teaching in the past four years. For most of these years, he worked with Dr. Beth Russell as a research assistant on the Connecticut School-Based Diversion Initiative (SBDI). His main responsibilities included data analyses and reports on how interventions by SBDI potentially contributed to the mental health and school disciplines of students at risk. He also worked with Drs. Kari Adamsons and Na Zhang on a substance use project and a mindfulness intervention meta-review respectively, which significantly improved his research skills. Additionally, he worked as a teaching assistant for Research Methods in HDFS (2004W) with Drs. Rachel Tambling and Keith Bellizzi and later taught the same course independently. These experiences deepened his understanding of how to be a good instructor.

Yuyang’s research interests mainly involve how parent-child relationships and parenting influence adolescents’ development in Chinese families. Because of the scope of the population, he was particularly interested in phenomena unique to Chinese families and the factors associated with these phenomena. From these interests he developed research on filial piety, a specific Chinese cultural value about child duties in families, in his general exam and dissertation. In his dissertation, he examined how filial piety values were potentially associated with Chinese parents’ parenting behaviors, and how these factors were related to children’s mental health and emotional well-being outcomes in two papers. Yuyang will soon start a new position as a postdoctoral scholar at East China Normal University and continue his research on filial piety.

Outside of his academic and work life, Yuyang enjoys exercise, martial arts, video games, and traveling.

Huda Akef is a PhD candidate planning to defend her dissertation and graduate in Summer 2025. Before finding her way to HDFS, she started her academic journey with a B.S. in Electronics Engineering with a minor in Computer Science from the American University in Cairo. After working as an engineer for a telecom operator in Egypt for a few years, her emerging interest in the social sciences led her to a renewed academic path in the US. She completed a Master of Education in Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While applying for PhD programs the following year, she worked as a research assistant in the Social Learning Lab in the Psychology Department at Stanford University, contributing to studies investigating how children’s social interactions shape their learning.

Huda’s interest in parenting in different cultural contexts drew her to the UConn HDFS PhD program to work with Dr. Charles Super and Dr. Sara Harkness. Recognizing the scarcity of research on Egyptian and Arab families, she designed and implemented a qualitative study to explore child rearing, parenting practices, and parent-child relationships in an upper middle-class community in Cairo, Egypt, while working on her project for the Culture, Health, and Human Development (CHHD) certificate. Building on her analysis of the interview data, she developed her research interests further and gained deeper understanding of how religion informs parenting, shapes family life, and intertwines with culture. Her interest in the intersection of research on religion and families, specifically in understudied Majority World populations, drew her to scholarship from different social science disciplines. In her dissertation, she’s critically examining how religion has been studied in relation to families utilizing a decolonial lens, in addition to examining how religion shapes parental ethnotheories and family life through her interview data with Muslim Egyptian parents. While working on her dissertation, Huda is also working part time at the Social Research Division at Employment and Social Development Canada. As part of a team focusing on disability and accessibility, she’s working on quantitative research projects examining the experiences of persons with disabilities in Canada using national datasets such as the Canadian Survey on Disability and the General Social Survey.

Outside of her academic and work life, Huda enjoys walking with her dog Anisa, listening to many podcasts and audiobooks, watching TV shows, taking on occasional woodworking projects, and tending to her plants indoors in the winter or in her balcony garden over the summer.