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.

Graduate student Michelle Miller recently received El Instituto’s 2024-2025 Predoctoral Fellowship from the University of Connecticut’s Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean and Latin American Studies to support her dissertation titled: “A Mixed Methods Investigation of Acculturative Stress, Cultural Values and Well-being among Latine University Students”.

Graduate student Rui Wu received the 2025 Arnold and Sandra Dashefsky Student Award for Excellence. This award is given to a student who  demonstrates outstanding academic achievement in one of the following topics: American Jewry, prejudice discrimination, racism, or anti-semitism. Congratulations Rui!

Congratulations to *Madeline Hebert and Peter McCauley, who both received the 2025 Wood/Raith Living Trust Summer Fellowship!

Congratulations to *Nate Stekler, newly elected Students and New Professionals Representative of the NCFR Research and Theory Section.