Mar. 20, 2025
Congratulations to Counseling and Human Services alumna Annalisa Smithson '18g. Smithson is the founder of Unleashed Counseling in Pottstown, PA. Her practice was recently named Eastern Pennsylvania's woman-owned small business of the year.
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.
A strong bond between a young child and their caregiver plays an important role in laying the foundation for children’s future health and wellbeing. This bond, or attachment, can be measured as the level of connection and safety young children feel with their parent or caregiver. As the director of the CARE Lab at Lehigh, Susan Woodhouse and her team study caregiving attachment and how children learn to manage and express their emotions. They then share this information to help parents respond to their children’s needs.
What a great event! Thirty-three COE graduate students shared their high-impact research at the Inaugural College of Education Student Research Colloquium last Friday. Students from the Counseling Psychology, Educational Leadership, School Psychology, Special Education and Teaching, Learning and Technology programs participated in the Mountaintop campus poster session.
Thank you to everyone who came out to show their support.