Affiliates
Dr. He is an affiliate at the University of Maryland, College of Education. Broadly, her research investigates the role of motor activity in psychological processes, encompassing a wide range of psychological development, from perception and attention to cognition, speech, and socioemotional changes in diverse populations and cultural settings. A primary objective of her research, in collaboration with Dr. Natasha Cabrera and the lab, is to understand how experiential factors, such as adverse family and socioeconomic situations, and ethnic minorities, would mediate children's developmental outcomes. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She was a recipient of the University of Maryland President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. Currently, she is an assistant professor of psychology at Mount St. Mary's University.
Melanie is a PhD candidate in Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology at Ruhr University Bochum. In 2024, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for a four-month research stay at the University of Maryland. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Dresden University of Technology and her Master of Science in Clinical Psychology from Ruhr University Bochum. Melanie is a licensed psychotherapist in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and is currently undergoing additional training to obtain her license in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy. Her research interests include the transgenerational transmission of parental mental disorders, emotion regulation, and emotion socialization as mechanisms of transgenerational transmission, and caregiver–child interactions.
Dr. Jerry West
Dr. West is an affiliate at the University of Maryland, College of Education. His research interests include school readiness, child care and early education, mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in their children’s education, and kindergarten in the U.S. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1979 with a concentration in social psychology. Over his 30+ year career, he has designed and directed national cross-sectional studies of preschool, school-age children, and adults, and national longitudinal surveys of children’s development and learning from birth through middle childhood. As a Senior Fellow at Mathematica Policy Research for more than 10 years, Dr. West directed the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) and other large-scale studies. Prior to joining Mathematica, he was the Director of the Early Childhood and Household Studies Program at the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
Dr. Uzun was born in 1978 in Ceyhan, Adana, Turkey. He completed his primary and secondary education in Ceyhan and received his undergraduate degree from Atatürk University, followed by a master’s degree from Inonu University. He earned his Ph.D. in Child Development and Education from Ankara University in February 2016. In 2021, Dr. Uzun was conferred the title of Associate Professor in the field of Child Development. His academic work primarily focuses on parent education and parent-child relationships, early childhood development, 21st-century childhood, childhood obesity, children’s rights and law, and child development- especially motor and language development. In 2024, he was invited as a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he will engage in scientific research funded by a TÜBİTAK project.
Duncan Fisher
Duncan is an affiliate at the University of Maryland, College of Education. He has spent the last 23 years promoting change in policy, practice, and culture to be more supportive of fatherhood. Throughout this time, evidence from research has been his key tool. In 2014, he set up the Child & Family Blog with Michael Lamb to report on family and child development research. Fatherhood is a strong theme on the Blog. He also reports on research on fathers and maternal & newborn health: 300 research reports on FamilyIncluded.com since 2015. In the UK, he co-founded the Fatherhood Institute and helped lead the fatherhood debate in the UK. He received an OBE from the Queen in 2008 “for services to children”. Now he is working internationally to challenge the lack of attention to fatherhood in health, child, gender, and economic programmes.
Jay Fagan, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Work at Temple University and former Co-director of the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network. His research has focused on father-child relationships and coparenting in nonresidential and low-income families; responsible fatherhood programs; coparenting interventions for low-income mothers and fathers; fathers with children in Head Start and child welfare; and adolescent fathers. Jay has published more than 100 peer-reviewed research papers, mostly on fathers. His new book, Fathers and Children Together: A Guide to Developing a Parenting Identity and Supporting your Child (2024, Routledge), co-authored with Dr. Glen Palm, is intended for an audience of fathers, mothers, and practitioners. He has also published the textbooks, New Parenting Programs for Low-income Fathers, with Dr. Jessica Pearson; Fathers and Early Childhood Programs, with Dr. Glen Palm; and Clinical and Educational Interventions with Fathers, with Dr. Alan J. Hawkins. He was the founding editor of the journal, Fathering. He taught human behavior and social environment courses at Temple University.