Human Development & Family Science

Jillian Caldwell Carpenter is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at Oklahoma State University. Her research focuses on strengthening and promoting healthy relationships to enhance well-being for at-risk or underserved populations, including first responders, members of the military, veterans, and disaster survivors. She earned her Bachelor's degree from the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma and her MS and PhD from Oklahoma State University. She joined the faculty of Oklahoma State University in 2022, where she teaches future human service professionals as they learn to serve and support others.

Research Interests:

Areas of focus: Family adaptation to trauma, crises, and adversity; family relationships, health, and well-being; disaster and conflict; family resilience; theory construction; measurement; integration of theory and research

Populations: first responders, military, veterans, disaster survivors, individuals with disabilities

My research is focused on the short and long term effects of adverse childhood experiences and childhood maltreatment. I'm particularly interested in the role interpersonal relationships (e.g., couple, parent-child) play linking childhood maltreatment to mental health and physical health outcomes. In my research I operate primarily from life course, attachment, family systems, bioecological, and developmental psychopathology frameworks.

Professional Website: https://sites.google.com/view/michaelfitzgeraldphd/home

Youtube channel for dyadic data tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/@michaelfitzgeraldPhD 

I am a Professor and Associate Director of the OSU Center for Developmental Disabilities in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at Oklahoma State University. In 2020, I co-founded the OSU Center for Developmental Disabilities to advance research, training, community partnerships, and supports that improve the lives of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families. Building on this commitment, I helped found Opportunity Orange Scholars (OOS), OSU’s inclusive higher-education program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, which was established in fall 2022. I currently serve as a faculty mentor for OOS. Together, these initiatives reflect my commitment to fostering belonging, expanding opportunity, and building more inclusive communities.

Before assuming my current role, I served as core faculty (2007-2021) and Program Director (2016-2017) of the OSU Marriage and Family Therapy program. My scholarship focuses on enhancing quality of life, belonging, and relationship outcomes among vulnerable, often marginalized, and traditionally underserved populations, including female trauma survivors, at-risk youth, and individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Rather than viewing vulnerability as a fixed individual deficit, I use a social-ecological lens that understands vulnerability as emerging from the fit between people and their environments. Guided by this perspective, my applied research, community programming, and clinical work do not seek to “fix” individuals. Instead, they aim to transform how people are understood and supported across contexts and systems, helping create conditions that promote belonging, stronger relationships, and improved quality of life.

Research Interests:

Trauma

Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Family Caregivers

Person-Centered Services

Respite

Amanda Harrist is an emeritus professor in Human Development & Family Science at Oklahoma State University and holds the Bryan Close Professorship in Early Childhood Development. She received her Bachelor's degree from the University of Texas and her PhD in Child Development from the University of Tennessee. She joined the OSU faculty in 1998. She was the Associate Director for Translation & Education at OSU's Center for Family Resilience and editor of a book series published by Springer titled, Emerging Issues in Family and Individual Resilience.

Research Interests:

* Psychosocial factors in childhood obesity
* Child obesity intervention
* Family Resilience theory
* Kindergarten classroom interventions to facilitate inclusive play
* Family (parent-child, sibling, marital) interaction in early school years

Adolescent and family competence and resilience within contexts (culture, schools, neighborhoods, communities, family structure, immigration). My focus is on adolescent-family competence and family resilience.

Nikki Huckabay is a veteran educator and Teaching Instructor in Early Childhood Education at Oklahoma State University. After 16 years in the kindergarten classroom, she now prepares future teachers to create joyful, intentional, and developmentally appropriate learning experiences for young children.

Her areas of expertise include play-based learning, early math and science instruction, creative expression, child-centered classroom design, and family engagement. Nikki is passionate about leading professional development sessions that equip early childhood educators with practical tools, creative ideas, and research-informed strategies that can be implemented right away.

My research agenda is driven by four major concerns: promoting health and psychological well-being across the lifespan, improving accessibility to research through the development and implementation of interventions, recommending policy innovations through evidence-based research, and rigorous evaluation of the psychometric properties of measurement constructs.

The main goal of my research is to improve the quality of family science research, especially in the area of parental discipline. Accordingly, my research has been looking for alternative disciplinary tactics that are more effective than spanking, to provide evidence that is currently lacking to recommend alternatives to replace spanking. My research has also focused on maximizing the effectiveness of all disciplinary tactics so that they can all work together to enhance the overall effectiveness of optimal authoritative parental discipline. A related focus is to evaluate and improve the quality of causal inferences in statistical analyses used in family science research. My research has benefited greatly from many excellent collaborators here at Oklahoma State University and elsewhere.

Boo Young Lim earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in Early Childhood Education. Previously, she served in Myanmar's teacher preparation program, where she played a pivotal role as a program coordinator, overseeing the development and enhancement of the program in collaboration with the Myanmar Department of Social Welfare. Lim's research interests encompass various aspects of education, including multicultural and cross-cultural comparative studies, technology integration for Dual Language Learners (DLLs), linguistic and mathematical environments in early childhood settings, and the correlation between school readiness and development. She has contributed to scholarly publications addressing topics such as DLLs' language development, learning through play, and strategies for Official Development Assistance (ODA) implementation in early childhood education, emphasizing cross-cultural and culturally responsive pedagogy.

Dr. Lin's research expertise centers on parenting, parent-child interactions, and stressors within immigrant families, with a particular focus on Chinese immigrants, supported by funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). She is passionate about bridging developmental and family research with practical parenting education for families and communities and holds certifications from Active Parenting for teaching "Active Parenting 4th edition" and "Parenting Your 1- to 4-Year-Old." 

Beyond her expertise in child development and family science, Dr. Lin is a quantitative methodologist, specialiizing in enhancing causal evidence in non-randomized longitudinal research. Her methodological work includes  mediation and moderation analyses, propensity score matching, structural equation modeling, and latent class analysis. Dr. Lin's innovative dual-centered ANCOVA has received NICHD funding. 

She is proficient in a variety of statistical software, including Stata, Mplus, R, SAS, SPSS, and Python, and holds certifications in teaching data management and statistical programs.

Research Interests:

Quantitative Methods
- Making causal inferences from longitudinal studies
- Statistical model comparisons
Child Development
- Parenting across diverse cultures
- Parent-child interactions
Immigrant family well-being
- Risk and resilience in immigrant families
- Evaluating measures for immigrant populations

On-going Research Project:

Shared Language Erosion In Chinese American Immigrant Families

I am a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at Oklahoma State University and serve as Assistant Program Coordinator for Early Childhood Education. I earned my PhD in Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum from the University of Oklahoma in 2014.

I joined the OSU–HDFS department in 2016 after serving as an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. In 2016, I was recognized as a Teaching Fellow with the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE).

My areas of expertise include emergent literacy development, oral language development, reading instruction, and instructional coaching. I am deeply passionate about the preparation and development of future early childhood educators, with a strong emphasis on supporting students as they grow into confident, reflective novice teachers.

Research Interests:

Early Childhood Education

Instructional Coaching

Early Literacy Development

Pre-Service Teacher Self-Efficacy

Education/Teacher Advocacy

Student Lead Campus Organizations

Emily Tucker is a teaching assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, and the program director of Opportunity Orange Scholars. Dr. Tucker's educational background is in Medical Family Therapy, and her work focuses on increasing equity and inclusion for folks with intellectual disability. Her research has explored ways to increase access to equitable healthcare and post-secondary education for adults with intellectual disability. She currently serves as the program director for Opportunity Orange Scholars. As the program director Dr. Tucker works to increase access to post-secondary education for folks with intellectual disability, on OSU's campus and beyond. Dr. Tucker also works with OSU students who are interested in working with folks with intellectual disability in a wide range of professional areas (e.g., healthcare, education, research, social work, mental health).

Mengya Wang, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science and an Extension State Specialist with the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service (OCES). She is an applied economist whose work focuses on framing, developing, and evaluating Extension educational programs in the areas of family and consumer economics and personal finance.

Dr. Wang’s research centers on prevention-oriented approaches to building financial security across the lifespan. Her work emphasizes financial socialization—how families, schools, and communities shape the development of healthy financial behaviors early in life—and how these early foundations influence financial capability and resilience in adulthood.

She is particularly interested in understanding how individuals can be better prepared for unexpected life events, such as caregiving responsibilities, financial shocks, divorce and major health or family transitions. Much of her current work examines the challenges that emerge in midlife and older adulthood, and how early financial development interacts with later-life circumstances to shape long-term financial well-being.