CUPID members work within a broad range of institutions involved in preparing and supporting the early childhood workforce. CUPID is an open group with no specific criteria for membership, and members participate as regularly as their time, passions, and priorities allow. Some of our members are listed below. Link to their pages to learn more:
Claire Vallotton, Michigan State University
Claire is the Founding Coordinator of CUPID. Her research focuses on early development of social-emotional and communication skills in the context of relationships with caregivers, and the influences of caregiver characteristics and culture. With CUPID, she studies the development of competencies in the infant/toddler workforce, and uses her research to inform her teaching. Learn more about Claire’s work here: http://vallotto.msu.domains/bio/
Rachel Chazan Cohen, Tufts University
Throughout her career in government and academic settings, Rachel has worked on the creation, evaluation, and refinement of early childhood programs, including home visiting and child care. Rachel is particularly interested in the competencies necessary for success in working with families with young children and how to build competencies through pre- and in-service professional development. Rachel is a founding member CUPID and was integral to the team that developed the CUPID competencies and measures to assess these competencies. She also assisted in the drafting of the Relationship-Based Competencies (versions for home visitors, family support workers, and teachers) for the National Center on Parent, Family and Community Engagement, and she is assisting the State of Massachusetts in creating a competency-based credentialing system as well as measuring competencies for both the child care and home visiting workforce.
CUPID MEMBER BIOS 2020
Elita Amini Virmani, Sonoma State University
Elita aims to support the social-emotional health and well-being of young children through research and training on relationship-based interventions. She is focused on ways that reflective practice and supervision promote parent and teacher capacity to see from the child’s point of view. Elita believes that as we learn to see from the child’s perspective we gain important insights into ways to be more sensitive and attuned to supporting their healthy social-emotional growth and development. Elita sees it as our social responsibility to ensure that all young children are seen for who they are and honored for who they are, central to which is their cultural and linguistic identity.
Marjorie Beeghly, Wayne State University
I am a professor in the Department of Psychology at Wayne State University, and currently serve as chair for its Developmental Science area. I also am core faculty in Wayne State’s Infant Mental Health Dual Title program. My research evaluates how parenting quality and parent-child interactive processes contribute to children’s positive developmental and behavioral outcomes in the context of. biologic and social risks such as premature birth, poverty, intrauterine drug exposure, child maltreatment, violence, or parental psychopathology. I am especially interested in examining whether parenting quality and parent-child interactive processes mediate the association between contextual risk factors and children’s outcomes in different at-risk groups. I regularly teach undergraduate and graduate classes in developmental science, including lifespan human development, infant development, child behavior and development, infant assessment, social development across the lifespan, and cognitive development across the lifespan.
Holly Brophy-Herb, Michigan State University
Holly Brophy-Herb is a Professor of Child Development, Department of Human Development and Family Studies.. Holly studies how: 1) parents/ECE teachers socialize very young children’s emotions; 2) emotions socialization practices vary according to characteristics such as family/ECE classroom climate, culture, and parents’/teachers’ reflective capacity, and mental health; and, 3) emotion socialization practices, including mind-mindedness, relate to early social-emotional development. Her work informs the development of intervention and training models in family and childcare/ECE contexts. Holly holds an infant mental health endorsement from the Alliance for the Advancement of Infant Mental Health, serves on the board of the World Association for Infant Mental Health and is Editor of the Infant Mental Health Journal. In her CUPID work, Holly collaborated on the creation of competencies for infant/toddler professionals and is a co-author on Working Well with Babies (to be released in 2020 by RedLeaf Press). She is also interested in how mindfulness and reflective practices in higher education help prepare early childhood teachers to maintain their mental health and engage in the emotionally-responsive, intentional work that help infants, toddlers, and families thrive. Learn more at https://www.beeslab.org.
Martha Buell, University of Delaware
I have been a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Delaware since 1996. I teach classes in human development; research methods; infant and toddler development and programming; and administration, leadership and advocacy. My research focuses on factors that influence the professional development of early childhood teachers and child care providers. I am particularly interested in factors that affect the quality of early care and education for infants and toddlers. I was the original director and continue to work with the Early Head Start program operated by the University of Delaware, and as the director of the Delaware Institute for Excellence in Early Childhood, I am involved in state level policy development and implementation.
Melissa Burnham, University of Nevada, Reno
Melissa Burnham, Ph.D. is Program Coordinator and Professor of Human Development and Family Studies and Early Childhood Education. She has been a faculty member at the University of Nevada, Reno since the fall of 2001. Dr. Burnham’s research interests focus on the examination of infant and child development in context. She has studied the impact of quality early care and education on development and P-3 educational reform efforts, and has been involved in P-3 work at the local and state levels in Nevada since 2011. Dr. Burnham has worked on an initiative resulting in existing primary teachers obtaining licensure in Early Childhood Education, and in the creation of a new Educational Leadership principal preparation program in collaboration with the Washoe County School District. She previously served as the Associate Dean of the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Reno. Learn more about Melissa Burnham here: https://www.unr.edu/education/faculty-and-staff/human-development-and-family-studies/melissa-burnham
GIna A. Cook, California State University, Stanislaus
Gina Cook, PhD is an Associate Professor in the department of Psychology and Child Development at California State University, Stanislaus. She has been extensively involved in the development and evaluation of early intervention programs for children and families in populations facing challenges of poverty, disabilities, and dual language acquisition for over 20 years. Her research examines ways in which caregivers, including parents or early childhood professionals, support young children’s development, in particular through home-based early intervention services. She has worked on the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project and a multisite study evaluating the benefits of early intervention via telepractice. Dr. Cook’s work includes providing professional development and consulting to programs to improve parent engagement in intervention services. She co-developed the PICCOLO (Parenting Interactions with Children: Checklist of Observations Linked to Outcomes) measure of developmental parenting and the HOVRS (Home Visit Rating Scales) an observational measure of home visitor effectiveness. Her primary program of research focuses on home-based intervention services for children with risks for delay and professionals’ use of research-based recommended practices.
Kalli B. Decker, Montana State University
Kalli is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education & Child Services. Much of Kalli’s research focuses on infants and toddlers with special needs who receive early intervention services, including how to support their families, the professionals who provide early intervention services, and the preservice students who will go on to provide home visiting or related early intervention services. In her work with CUPID collaborators, Kalli seeks to better understand what influences preservice early childhood professionals’ knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Given her interest in supporting students to pursue careers that support infants and toddlers with special needs, Kalli partnered with others to expand the CUPID infant/toddler workforce core competencies to include competencies for home visitors as well (see Roggman et al., 2016 in the Publications & Presentations tab of this website). Learn more about Kalli here: http://www.montana.edu/hhd/directory/1892450/kalli-decker
Maria Fusaro, San José State University
Maria Fusaro is an Associate Professor in Child and Adolescent Development at San José State University. Her research centers on how young children learn from and with other people, through verbal and gesture-based communication and through question-answer exchanges. Bridging her teaching and research, she also studies the preparation of undergraduate students for careers in infant/toddler care and education, and for providing high quality, supportive learning experiences for young children. Learn more about her work with the Early Childhood Institute at SJSU, supporting each and every child from the start, at: http://www.sjsu.edu/education/academics/eci/index.html
Jennifer Gilken, Borough of Manhattan Community College
Jennifer Gilken is an Assistant Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City. Jennifer is the program coordinator for the early childhood program in the Teacher Education Department. Prior to teaching and researching, Jennifer spent over 20 year in the field of early childhood education as a teacher and director. Jennifer received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include examining ways to support the infant toddler workforce, STEM in early childhood education, and investigating methods that support students’ feelings of belonging. Currently, Jennifer is the lead PI on a grant investigating infant-toddler course content in NYS undergraduate early childhood education.
Holly Hatton-Bowers, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Holly is an Assistant Professor in Child, Youth, and Family Studies and an Early Childhood Extension Specialist. Her scholarly interests are in the area of parenting and early care and education, with an emphasis on promoting and enhancing the well-being of caregivers and young children’s social-emotional development. She is active in translating and disseminating current research findings in the areas of caregiving and health in early childhood using an interdisciplinary approach. She is particularly interested in understanding how compassion, mindfulness, and reflective practices promote the emotional well-being of parents and early childhood professionals.
Kere Hughes-Belding, Iowa State University
As a researcher and teacher, Kere Hughes-Belding joined CUPID in order to collaborate with colleagues across the country and improve the relationship environments of young children. Kere’s work in program evaluation and professional development of home visitors aims to increase the effectiveness of the workforce by enhancing both pre-service and in-service training and supervision. As a part of the CUPID team, Kere assisted with the development of CUPID competencies for home visitors. She is currently engaging to better understand how Adverse Childhood Experiences impact both early childhood professionals and the children and families they serve and the factors that mitigate these impacts.
Jean Ispa, University of Missouri
Jean Ispa is an emerita professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science. Her research interests center on socioeconomic and cultural influences on parenting and child development during the earliest years and longitudinally. Her earlier work included studies linking political changes in the USSR/Russia to changing child-rearing values and practices, as well as studies describing parenting and child outcome variations in Early Head Start Families. Currently she is working on a longitudinal study relating early childhood socioeconomic and cultural contexts in African American, European American, and Mexican-descent families to the quality of mother-child discourse during middle childhood. Her work with the CUPID Consortium has focused on individual and higher education curriculum characteristics that support the preparation of effective early childhood teachers and home visitors.
Loria Kim, Michigan State University
Loria Kim is a PhD student in Human Development and Family Studies at Michigan State University. She is interested in the research area of infant/toddler development, teacher preparation, and professional development along with high quality care. Her interests developed over time as she worked with infants and toddlers in university based childcare centers and laboratory schools. Loria guided and mentored assistant teachers and student teachers on interactions with children and families as well as creating and implementing developmentally appropriate curriculum plans. She received a Master of Education in Early Childhood Special Education and a Bachelor of Science in Human Development and Family Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her Master’s research project was about early childhood providers’ perception on burnout, turnover, and prevention strategies.
Elizabeth King, Missouri State University
Elizabeth King is an Assistant Professor at Missouri State University. Elizabeth focuses on supporting the work and learning environments of children and teachers. Specifically, her research examines how early childhood teachers’ language shapes young children’s social emotional competence, and how teacher preparation, experiences, and work environments can promote children’s social emotional engagement through a social justice lens.
Maryssa Kucskar Mitsch, San Francisco State University
Maryssa Kucskar Mitsch is an Assistant Professor in Early Childhood Special Education (ECSE) in the Graduate College of Education at San Francisco State University. She works with graduate students in the ECSE credential, masters in special education, and undergraduate students in the Special Education Minor. Recently, she began working with first-year students in order to recruit them into different infant/toddler development and education preparation programs at SF State. Her research interests include inclusive practices for young children with disabilities, ECSE educator preparation, interdisciplinary training and social skills development for individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Learn more about Maryssa’s work here: https://gcoe.sfsu.edu/people/faculty/maryssa-kucskar-mitsch
Karen M. La Paro, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
I have been a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at UNC_Greensboro since 2004. My research focuses on the preparation of early childhood educators and child care providers. I am particularly interested in the classroom based experiences in educator preparation programs and the systems that influence both the implementation of these experiences in preparation programs as well as student experiences during their practicum experiences. I am also interested and have worked in assessing process quality in early childhood settings. At UNC_GreensboroI teach an advanced practicum course and a course focused on leadership and advocacy for undergraduate students in our early childhood educator preparation program.
Patricia Lanzon, Henry Ford College
Patricia Lanzon is the Pre-Education Program Director, faculty chair, and teacher at Henry Ford College in Dearborn, MI. Dr. Lanzon has taught and advised early childhood, elementary, and secondary education majors for over 20 years. In addition, she teaches a variety of psychology courses in the Psychology Department. She received her doctorate in Educational Psychology with a cognate in developmental psychology from Wayne State University. She has had the unique experience of teaching in a primarily Middle-Eastern community and has enjoyed learning about this culture. In addition, she is a volunteer for Warrior Women Against Poverty, a Detroit based single-mother mentorship group.
Jennifer Longley, Borough of Manhattan Community College
Jennifer Longley is a teacher, researcher, and community activist based in Yonkers, NY. Longley has worked with infants, toddlers, and families for over 20 years. She received her doctorate in Education Leadership, Management, and Policy from Seton Hall University (2015). Since then, Longley has had the pleasure of teaching and learning from her students and colleagues as an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York. She has had the privilege of serving on and collaborating with the diverse members of the Yonkers Basics Advisory Board, Yonkers Pride Foundation, and Yonkers Mayor Michael Spano’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Board. Her research interests include infant-toddler workforce development, family-centered programming, and the experiences of early childhood teachers.
Caitlin McPherran Lombardi, University of Connecticut
Caitlin McPherran Lombardi is an Assistant Professor in the Human Development and Family Sciences department at the University of Connecticut. Her research examines the roles of family, early child care and education, school, and community for promoting children’s cognitive and social-emotional development, particularly in the context of economic and social disadvantages. The overarching goal of this research is to identify the processes through which inequality is transmitted to children’s development in order to understand how policy can best support children and families.
Jennifer Mortensen, University of Nevada, Reno
Jennifer Mortensen is an Assistant Professor in Human Development and Family Studies program in the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research focuses on understanding risk and protective factors as they relate to parent-infant interactions, parental well-being, and infant socioemotional development. Her research also examines the role of early care and home visiting settings in fostering well-being, especially for economically disadvantaged families or infants/toddlers experiencing maltreatment. Dr. Mortensen is a Certified Family Life Educator and draws motivation for this work from her time as an infant-toddler teacher at Early Head Start. https://www.unr.edu/education/faculty-and-staff/human-development-and-family-studies/jennifer-mortensen
Sandra Ixa Plata-Potter, PhD
Sandie is an Associate Professor who teaches early childhood education and the core of her research interest is parental engagement. Parents are the first teachers to their developing child, thereby making their contributions key in every context. Whether the child is at home with the parent or under the care of another, it is imperative for parents to be knowledgeable of how their interactions contribute to their child’s development. There are two underlying issues that Sandie keeps top of mind as in pursuing this trajectory, one is being cognizant of the fact that the individual cultures of families play a pivotal role in how parents engage in their child’s development. Moreover, understanding that the definition of culture extends further than one’s ethnicity. The second is an awareness of the propensity of intergenerational academic deficits, and how parental funds of knowledge are relevant to the nature and extent of parental engagement. Her research asks: What is the parental frame of reference with regards to their interactions with their developing child and how is it manifested? The second part to this question is how parents make sense of acquired knowledge gained through their participation in programs and services designed to empower them with the necessary tools for assisting their child.
Laura Nathans, PhD, Penn State Scranton
Laura is an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State Scranton who teaches courses on statistics, research methods, family theories, family development, and early childhood play. Her main research focus is on home visiting programs. She studies both home visitor professional development and overall effectiveness of home visiting programs. She has a specific interest in reflective supervision and other reflective practices. She also publishes in the area of parent involvement on data addressing training preservice teachers to teach parent involvement content once they become teachers. Lastly, she is conducting a multidomain evaluation of a foster care independent living program. She has previously worked as a home visitor doing home-based counseling.
Lori A. Roggman, Utah State University
Lori Roggman, Professor of Human Development at Utah State University, studies how parents and other caregivers support children’s early development and how effective practitioners promote developmentally supportive caregiver-child relationships in home visiting programs. She has provided training and consulting to improve the quality of home visiting services for families with infants and young children in the US and internationally. She was the lead developer of the PICCOLO (Parenting Interactions with Children: Checklist of Observations Linked to Outcomes), an observational measure of developmentally supportive parenting interactions, and the Home Visit Rating Scales (HOVRS), an observational measure of home visiting quality.
Ann M. Stacks, Wayne State University
Ann Stacks is the Director of the Infant Mental Health Dual-Title Degree Program at Wayne State University and a faculty member at WSU’s Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute. Her program of research focuses on dimensions of caregiving that support social emotional development in early childhood, especially in the context of family risk, including poverty and maltreatment. She is particularly interested in the protective role that caregiver reflective functioning and sensitivity play in supporting the development of a secure attachment and social emotional competence in young children and in understanding effective ways to promote caregiver reflective functioning and sensitivity in parents who have a history of childhood maltreatment and in early childhood teachers.
Julia C. Torquati, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Julia Torquati is a Professor in Child, Youth and Family Studies. She was director of the Ruth Staples Child Development Lab for 8 years, and in that role provided leadership for an attachment-oriented approach (i.e., teacher as a secure base) to early childhood teacher preparation, and led a transformation toward nature-focused curriculum. Her research focuses on how children’s experiences influence development, and processes of risk and resilience in particular. Her program of research examines how human relationships and natural environments (i.e., nature outdoors) influence children’s development and well-being from an ecological and evolutionary perspective. For example, she has examined how relationships with parents buffer the effects of homelessness among children; associations between family dynamics and preschool children’s coping, social competence, and emotional well-being; and how natural environments support children’s self-regulation and cognitive functioning. She also studies how adult well-being is associated with their ability to effectively nurture children’s development, for example how parents’ and teachers’ state of mind with respect to attachment influences their interactions with young children.
Bridget A. Walsh, University of Nevada, Reno
Her research focuses on home visiting, family life education, and early childhood. She is a Certified Family Life Education (CFLE) and in 2016 was recognized as the CFLE of the year by NCFR. Learn more about Bridget’s work here: https://www.hdfsbridgetwalsh.com/
Melissa Clucas Walter, Northern Illinois University
Melissa Clucas Walter is an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences with an emphasis in Child Development at Northern Illinois University. Her research broadly examines the learning opportunities young children experience within their natural environments, and the caregiver interactions needed to optimize individual child outcomes. Melissa is currently examining how mobile technology impacts the quality of parent-child interactions with infants and toddlers.
Carla Peterson, Iowa State University
Carla Peterson is a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. Her research focuses on children facing risks (e.g., disability, poverty, parental abuse), and she has worked with both classroom-based and home-based programs in public and private agencies. Her research focuses specifically on documenting implementation of targeted intervention strategies. She has experience working in early childhood services as a researcher, trainer, administrator, and practitioner. She has directed numerous research and evaluation projects with most of these projects completed in collaboration with a state agency and/or local partners.
Christine Lippard, Iowa State University
Christine Lippard is a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. Her research focuses on quality early care and education for young children, specifically on development of preservice teachers, infants and toddlers experiences in group care, and STEM in early childhood education. Dr. Lippard’s research builds on her own experiences as an undergraduate pre-service teacher, a preschool teacher in both university lab school and subsidized child care settings, and her time coaching Early Head Start and Head Start teachers.
