The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) is the premier organization for family science and the annual meeting was held in Bellevue, Washington in November. Several Mizzou HDFS representatives were honored with awards this year.
Dr. So Young Park, a post-doctoral fellow in HDFS, was awarded the Harold and Margaret Feldman Award for Best Conference Proposal by a New Professional. This NCFR award recognizes her dedication to advancing family policy through research and practice and reflects the importance of the recipient’s contributions to the field. Dr. Park’s proposal titled “Current Judicial Landscape of Establishing Parenthood for Non-Biological LGBTQ Parents and A Scoping Review of Children Outcomes” was selected among many proposals submitted to the family policy section. This year, the section received the highest number of proposals in the last five years. Dr. Park’s study aimed to shift the focus to systemic and structural change by first addressing inconsistencies in family court judgments on parental rights.
Karen Talley, a graduate student in HDFS, received the Feldman Outstanding Research Proposal for Research in Family Policy, for her project with Dr. Kale Monk. The Feldman Award recognizes an NCFR member who has demonstrated excellence in research and potential contributions to family policy studies, particularly in the areas of gender/women’s issues or poverty. Karen’s proposal was titled “From Providers to Policy: The Needs of LGBTQ+ Survivors of Interpersonal Violence” and involves interviewing service providers of LGBTQ+ survivors of interpersonal violence on the needs, barriers, and resources that would most benefit this population. She will present findings from this proposal at the 2025 NCFR conference.
Dr. Jeenkyoung Lee, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Family Policy and Research (CFPR), received the Best Family Financial Wellbeing Student Paper Award from the NCFR Family Financial Wellbeing Focus Group. This award goes to one paper annually to recognize outstanding scholarship in family financial well-being by a student (in this case, Dr. Lee as a student second author at that time). The paper she co-authored was titled, “The Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Adversity, BMI, and Emotional Distress from Adolescence to Middle Adulthood.” In this paper, Dr. Lee and her team investigate the intergenerational transmission of economic adversity, as well as physical and mental health outcomes across generations. This paper also includes Dr. Brenda Lohman and is published in the Journal of Family Psychology.