May. 28, 2025
Lia Sandilos, an associate professor in the School Psychology program, has been selected for the 2025 Class of '61 Professorship for the College of Education. This award recognizes faculty members who have achieved the rank of associate professor and have shown distinction in teaching, research and service. One faculty member from each of Lehigh's five colleges receives the professorship each year.
Once a week, Lori Gallagher Anderson arrives on Lehigh’s Mountaintop Campus with fresh groceries for the food pantry housed in Iacocca Building. Transporting all of those supplies into the building can be a challenge. “There are days I have my wagon piled high and multiple bags slung across each shoulder,” she laughed. But Anderson receives help from an unexpected source: a campus transit driver.
A recent op ed by COE professors George DuPaul and Lee Kern published in Penn Live suggests that the role of behavioral parent training [BPT] may be underutilized. For young children, especially those under six, leading health authorities, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), recommend that parents pursue behavioral interventions (specifically BPT] before turning to medication.
Josselyn Alvarenga, a second-year doctoral student in the COE’s Counseling Psychology program, is passionate about supporting healthy child development in marginalized families. Her research looks at how culture shapes the ways in which young children learn to handle and show their emotions.
Focusing on Black and Latinx families, Alvarenga looks at how parents and caregivers respond to their child’s distress, the child’s feelings of closeness and security with their caregivers, and how the child manages stress. She hopes that her research and the research of others within the Hands and Hearts Together project where she works, will promote wide-scale changes that positively impact family relationships and behaviors in these communities.