Exterior of Nancy Nicholas Hall in the evening, with lamps and windows glowing.
News & Events

Four SoHE Faculty Earn Promotions

Four faculty in the School of Human Ecology have earned promotions and will return to campus this fall with added distinction:

Dr. Robert L. Nix, the Audrey Rothermel-Bascom Professor in the department of Human Development and Family Studies and Integrated Specialist in Diverse and Underserved Children, Families, and Communities with the UW Division of Extension, has been promoted to full professor. In January, Reuters wrote up his newly published research on the promising outcomes of the “Recipe 4 Success” program he developed to promote healthy eating and self-regulation in toddlers, and he discussed the promising outcomes with the podcast of the American Association of Pediatrics. More recently, he published an article in Early Childhood Research Quarterly on the sustained effects of the Research-based Developmentally Informed Parent program (REDI-P) at fifth grade, six years after intervention, finding benefits across academic performance, social adjustment, and parent-child functioning.

Dr. Jennifer Gaddis, the Jane Rafferty Thiele Faculty Fellow in the department of Civil Society and Community Studies, has been promoted with tenure to associate professor. Gaddis has become recognized as a national expert on public school school lunch programs and their attendant questions of labor, feminist, environmental, and food justice, quoted or publishing op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, Teen Vogue, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Mother Jones, and numerous other publications. She is following up her popular 2019 book, The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools (University of California Press), with a forthcoming one making a global comparative study of public school lunch programs. Follow her on Twitter at @JenniferEGaddis.

Dr. Kristin Litzelman, of the Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS) department and Integrated Specialist with the UW Division of Extension’s Human Development and Relationships Institute and Health and Well-Being Institute, has been promoted with tenure to associate professor. Litzelman’s interests center on how illness impacts families, primarily through the lens of family caregiving, and her research found new resonance in the pandemic, when she wrote for UW Health about cancer caregiving considerations alongside COVID-19 and highlighting resources like the Caregiver Action Network, the Family Caregiver Alliance, and Aging and Disability Research Centers. Litzelman also serves as her department’s graduate program contact and recently coauthored with several of her graduate students in the journal Cancer on mental health care utilization by cancer patients’ spouse caregivers.

Dr. Sarah Anne Carter, of Design Studies and also Executive Director of the Center for Design and Material Culture (CDMC), has been promoted with tenure to Associate Professor. Carter has wasted no time in spearheading new programming for the CDMC and rapidly adapting it to accommodate pandemic safer-at-home guidance, including a virtual CDMC Conversations series with scholars and artists and a new podcast, Refrangible, examining the material culture stories of everyday objects. She is the author of several books; has penned numerous public-facing articles on material culture highlights, including a guest piece for the Washington Post on SoHE’s Practice Cottage lessons for pandemic life adjustments; and most recently coedited the 30-essay collection, The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture.