Celebrate curricular innovation, creativity, and the first-year experience with staff and faculty from across campus. Connect with resources available to you as a UNIV instructor or Learning Community Faculty Director. Share common and best practices with colleagues. Get a jump start of the 2015-2016 academic year. And collaborate with experts who can help you translate your ideas into practice.

View the conference program & start selecting your sessions and workshops. ResilienceProgramPrint

Important Information

Date: May 13, 201

Time: 8:30am-3:45pm

Location: Student Union Ballroom

Keynote Speaker Information

Dr. Crystal Park, Fostering Resilience in the First Year and Beyond

Crystal L. Park, Ph.D., is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Her research focuses on coping with stressful events, including the roles of religious beliefs and religious coping, the phenomenon of stress-related growth, and the making of meaning in the context of traumatic events and life-threatening illnesses, particularly with cancer survivors, congestive heart failure patients, and military veterans.  She has been studying stress, coping and well-being among college students for nearly 30 years, and is currently co-principal investigator (PI) (with Michelle Williams) of a new NIH-funded study of self-regulation and academic success in UConn students.  She is also currently PI of NIH-funded studies of yoga for stress-management and the development of a tool to measure essential properties of yoga. She is Co-Author of Empathic Counseling: Meaning, Context, Ethics, and Skill and the forthcoming Spirituality, Meaning, and Trauma and Co-Editor of The Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (first and second editions) and Medical Illness and Positive Life Change: Can Crisis Lead to Personal Transformation? At UConn, she maintains an active research lab of graduate and undergraduate students and teaches health psychology at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. 

Conference Opening Speaker Information

Dr. Erik Hines is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Hines teaches in the counseling program and prepares graduate students to be professional school counselors. Dr. Hines’s research agenda centers around: (a) African American male academic achievement and college readiness; (b) parental involvement and its impact on academic achievement for students of color; and (c) improving and increasing postsecondary opportunities for first generation, low-income, and students of color (particularly for African American males). Additionally, his research interests include career exploration in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) for students of color in K-12. His research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Counseling and Development, Professional School Counseling, and The High School Journal.