Graduate Student Spotlights - June 2025
Huda Akef
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.
See Previous Grad Student Spotlights
2024
January- Amanda Sather
February- Sihui Lyu
April-Emily Fritzson
May- Abagail Horton
June- Lexi Tomkunas
July- Veronica Hanna-Walker
September-Elise Sumsion
October- Lily Gorman
November- Sumin Kim
December-Ida Ghaemmaghamfarahani
2023
January- Madison Mas
February- Peter McCauley
March- Suge Zhang
April- Yuanyuan Zhang
May- Jessie Gentilella
June- Eleanor Fisk and Eminet Gurganus
July- Alyssa Clark and Tracy Walters
August- Sarah McGee and Lindsay Westberg
September- Ciara Collins and Kaleigh Ligus
October- Nikole Babcock and Naomi Inman
November- Anne Berset and Delaina Carlson
December- Tianmei Zhu
2022
January- Nathaniel Stekler
February- Benton Renley
March- Lindsay Westberg
April- Samantha Lawrence
May- Qianxia Jiang
June- Mackenzie Wink
July- Hilal Kuscul
August- Yuan Zhang
September- Madeline Jones
October- Alexander Del Farno
November- Sabrina Uva
December- Fanwen Zhang
2021
February- Ellen Pudney
March- Ciara Collins
April- Morica Hutchison
May- Anne Thompson Heller
October- Sydney Klein
November- Sarah Wen Warakys
December- Darlis Juvino