2024-11-20
- In fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the FRC Steering Committee kicked off a strategic planning process that culminated in spring 2023 with the release of a roadmap to guide the center’s initiatives through 2028. That plan outlined the center’s holistic approach to addressing wicked problems--those problems that defy simple solutions; cannot be addressed by any one discipline, program, or policy; and are never completely solved. Now, in fall 2024, we are thrilled to release...
- 2024-11-18 - People give for many reasons. Some want to leave a legacy or honor the life of a loved one. Others wish to help make change here and now. Some see an obvious overlap between tax implications and their philanthropic goals. Whatever the reason, Kimberly Bishop’s job was to listen. In her seven years as the Assistant Dean for Advancement in the College of ACES—coming on the heels of a dozen years as a major gift officer with the college—Bishop helped donors discover the kind of impact they wished to make. She is retiring effective December 1 after 34 years of dedicated service...
- 2024-11-13 - Tell us about yourself and about your background. I’m from China, and I earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China, majoring in early childhood education. My previous advisor has his degree in psychology. With him, I focused on children’s developmental health and growth, especially paying attention to social and emotional development in learning. That experience showed me that what I want to explore in my research is investigating how the family environment or the important caregivers of children can influence their social-emotional learning. Then I found out that...
- 2024-10-24 - Many of the youth participatory action research projects that aim to empower young people to lead change in their schools or communities often fail to fully integrate them into the process, diminishing participants’ learning opportunities and the projects’ potential impact, a recent study found. Two scholars at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with extensive experience with YPAR projects — Amy Leman, a professor in the Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communications Program; and Jacinda Dariotis, the...
- 2024-10-01 - In the following Q&A, Kai-Ning Wang, a new doctoral student of human development and family studies and graduate research assistant at the Family Resiliency Center, discusses her motivations for enrolling in the program, her history with and continued interest in mindfulness, and how her bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and professional experience as an engineer aligns with her subsequent education in clinical psychology and current training in human development and family studies. Tell me a little bit about your background. What do you do at FRC, and what is your research...
- 2024-09-30 - Sharon Donovan believes that the University of Illinois can offer a unique team science approach to nutrition. That is why she founded the Personalized Nutrition Initiative (PNI), which launched in July 2020. “With our long-standing strengths in plant, animal and human nutrition coupled with strengths in engineering, behavioral sciences and a bioengineering-focused medical school, we are positioned to have a unique Illinois approach to nutrition discovery and implementation,” said Donovan, a professor and Melissa M. Noel Endowed Chair in Nutrition and Health, director of PNI...
- 2024-09-24 - Decrease your salt intake. Eat a hearty breakfast. Opt for more veggies. Although many people are familiar with these sorts of common nutritional recommendations, they may also struggle to put them into practice. Some individuals even respond to such guidance as stressful or threatening to their eating routine—and experience a respective spike in their levels of cortisol or testosterone. Now, a new research collaboration at the University of Illinois aims to quantify the biological markers of those stress and threat responses and help reduce or counteract them. Family Resiliency Center...
- 2024-08-20 - During the summer months, you can expect to find a young person atop a lifeguard stand or behind an ice cream counter, but at the Family Resiliency Center (FRC), summer means hosting high school and undergraduate students who want to explore the research process. Across June, July and August, three students honed their research skills at FRC as they developed assessments for an ongoing project implementing a mindful movement program for preschoolers. Sophia Deltas, a junior at the University Laboratory High School, and Lai Wei, a senior at Mahomet-Seymour...
- 2024-08-20 - Is it possible to design spaces that support people in their day-to-day lives and allow them to recover from the stresses and strains of everyday activities? For over thirty years, this question has animated Bill Sullivan, a professor of landscape architecture and Collaboratory member at the Family Resiliency Center (FRC), to pursue a research agenda in urban design. Sullivan is...
- 2024-08-19 - For six weeks during the summer between their first and second years, medical students at Carle Illinois College of Medicine get to choose between training in a clinical setting, enrolling in an elective course, and immersing themselves in a research environment. For Preethi Prem, a rising second-year medical student, the choice was obvious. She wanted to spend her Discovery Learning Period performing research. “We can spend the six weeks doing any type of project we want,” said Prem, “and I wanted to do research. I didn’t have a huge background in that.” Prem chose to...
- 2024-07-18 - FRC Postdoctoral Research Associate Rachel Jackson-Gordon and FRC Director Jacinda Dariotis are leading a new project that explores how exposure to nature, music and mindful movement can serve as early childhood stress-coping strategies. By promoting emotional regulation, the project aims to prevent disruptive behaviors in early childhood that predict violent behaviors as children age. The project includes FRC Collaboratory affiliates Lynda Gibson...
- 2024-07-10 - Compromised self-regulation is a predictor of suboptimal student outcomes (e.g., poor academic performance, school drop-out), in part due to negative responses to stress. Teaching positive coping strategies is essential to prevent a cascade of negative health outcomes. Mindfulness and mindful movement strategies can be practiced by anyone, anywhere, offering substantial scalable potential for improving youth and family stress coping at little or no cost. In this presentation, Jacinda Dariotis will discuss quantitative and qualitative findings across six studies (randomized...
- 2024-05-29 - On the evening of April 8, 2024, Colleen Gibbons stepped up to the front of a crowded banquet hall to receive the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) Alumni Award of Merit, which is presented to ACES alums with a record of outstanding personal and professional accomplishments and who made extraordinary humanitarian contributions. Gibbons was being honored for a life and career dedicated to reforming the criminal legal system to improve the lives of individuals, families and communities. As a senior project manager at the...
- 2024-05-23 - For agencies in Champaign County that implement programs for individuals with developmental disabilities or mental health concerns, there is no shortage of pressing issues that warrant immediate attention. But how can these agencies best allocate their time and resources to project the greatest benefit? How can agencies assess their reach and effect of services on participant outcomes? These questions are ones that the Family Resiliency Center (FRC) has been studying over the past year and are the subject of their year-one annual report to the Champaign County Developmental Disability and...
- Oral presentations showcase FRC research projects at international conference on qualitative methods2024-05-20 - This year’s International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) featured research from the Family Resiliency Center across five—count ‘em, five!—oral presentations. Hosted at the University of Illinois from Wednesday, May 15 through Saturday, May 18, 2024, the 20th meeting of ICQI focused on how qualitative researchers can intervene and affect change in everyday life given such evolving conditions as political and economic strife, intensifying effects of climate change and the ravages of poverty and war. Scholars from around the world flocked to Illinois to celebrate community, experiment...