Antonia Caba completed her PhD in Fall 2024. She earned her bachelor’s degree in public health from Miami University in 2018 and her master’s in public health from Yale School of Public Health in 2020. In her time at UConn, Antonia worked on quantitative and qualitative research projects related to the determinants of health and wellbeing among LGBTQ+ adolescents and young adults. Under the mentorship of Dr. Ryan Watson, Antonia contributed to an NIH-funded, longitudinal study of Black and Latinx sexual minority men’s HIV prevention practices and a national survey of LGBTQ+ adolescents’ health and wellbeing in partnership with the Human Rights Campaign. Antonia’s dissertation focused on the role of social media and the internet in LGBTQ+ adolescents’ identity development.

Currently, Antonia is a Research Associate at the UConn School of Social Work, where she is a member of the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood-UConn School of Social Work Research Partnership. She supports the evaluation of state- and federally funded early childhood initiatives and systems in order to ensure access to high-quality early childhood care and education for Connecticut families.

Outside of work, Antonia can be found cooking, baking sourdough bread, hiking, working on embroidery projects, and exploring and traveling throughout New England and beyond!

Lauren Lafferty graduated with a BS in HDFS in 2005. During her time at UConn she led the HDFS student government, was named a New England Scholar, presented a thesis as an undergraduate and was later awarded an outstanding women’s award from the UConn Alumni Foundation. Lauren credits her HDFS degree as the bedrock for a nearly 20-year career focused on keeping families and children at the center of her equity focused work.

 

After graduating from UConn, Lauren worked for the Village for Families and Children in Hartford in out-of-school-time programming. Her work at the Village, combined with her HDFS background, fueled a desire to pursue her master’s degree. She moved to Boston and completed a master’s in education with a concentration in Risk and Prevention at Harvard University’s School of Education in 2008. At Harvard, Lauren was energized by her work as a Prevention Intern at the Gardner Pilot Academy (GPA), a community school in Boston. At this school she developed an ambition for high quality urban public education, led by a principal who excelled in this incredible work, allowing her to see the best practices in the field come to life.

 

In 2008 Lauren began her 16-year tenure at GPA. During this time, she designed, led and fundraised successfully for interventions, programs and partnerships that met the highest quality standards and supported families to thrive. She was tasked with funding the gap to ensure access to opportunity and quality learning for students beyond the public-school budget allocation. As a result of this work, Lauren raised and managed an average of $700,000 per year through grant writing and fundraising initiatives. Her work also required partnering with over 15 funders and 30 partners annually. Due to these efforts, GPA’s chronic absenteeism rate was lower than both the state and district averages, the family teacher conference rate of 100% was met annually and over 300 students and family members received basic needs in the form of clothing and food annually. As Senior Director of Extended Services, Lauren consulted, mentored and presented to many individuals from the field of community schools, early education, and prevention, all built off the foundation of HDFS.

 

Lauren is currently the Chief Program Officer at YWCA New Britain. In this role, she uses her collective experiences working in diverse urban communities for the past 20 years to support innovative programs and partnerships at the YWCA. She continues to work with an empowerment-focused and anti-racist lens, central to the YWCA mission, closing opportunity gaps through financial development.

 

Lauren currently resides in West Hartford, CT with her husband Gary and is the proud mom to Julia (4th grade) and Ava (1st grade). As someone raised in a large, loud and loving extended family, Lauren enjoys spending time with her many family members, friends and neighbors.

Anne Bladen has spent her career supporting families, children and students. After earning her BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College, she worked as a bilingual Welfare Caseworker in Willimantic, CT, during a time period marked by the AIDS crisis, opioid epidemic, and severe cuts to social programs. Seeing the challenges her clients faced, Anne decided to shift gears and focus on making an impact earlier in people’s lives. Reflecting on her volunteer work with young children in high school and college, she applied to UConn’s Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates.

 

Anne completed her MA in special education, focusing on children with special needs and implementing Alternative and Augmentative Communication with bilingual  preschool children. Her teaching journey began in Hartford’s public preschools, where she discovered the power of early intervention. After leaving Hartford, Anne taught special education for preschoolers and their typically developing peers as well as resource room support for students in grades K-4.

 

In 1996, Anne joined the UConn Child Development Labs (CDL) as a kindergarten teacher, later becoming the Special Needs Coordinator and then the Executive Director of the Child Labs, a position she held until 2021. Some of the highlights of these years included building a more nature-based program, working with teachers on play-based curriculum, teaching pre-service teachers in Early Childhood Specializations and developing collaborative relationships with other UConn departments such as Kinesiology, Communication Sciences, and Psychology to support both children at the Child Labs and UConn students.

 

In 2021, Anne transitioned to a full-time teaching faculty role in HDFS. This change has offered new opportunities, such as teaching different (and bigger!) classes but also keeps her deeply connected with the Child Labs and the incredible teachers who have been her community for so many years. In conjunction with the CDL teachers, Anne developed and started teaching HDFS 2142E: Exploring Conservation and Sustainability with Preschoolers in 2022, allowing her to continue to share her passion for nature with children and students. Anne has also had the opportunity to return to her Windham roots, building a partnership with the Head Start and Early Head Start programs so that students in HDFS 3192 (supervised fieldwork) now have placements in those programs, deeply enriching their experiences.

 

At home, in the Mansfield Hollow Historic District, Anne enjoys gardening, quilting, biking, and watching clouds and birds from the hammock. Her son, a UConn grad, works for the Conservation Fund and her daughter is an incoming member of the UConn class of 2029!

Congratulations to Rong Huang, recent HDFS postdoctoral scholar working with Rachel Chazan Cohen, who just started a position as assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Science and Counseling at Austin Peay State University!