The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) has conferred its prestigious fellow status on Chalandra M. Bryant, Ph.D., CFLE, professor and director of research in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Bryant has made significant contributions to Family Science through research, mentoring, and leadership. She served as co-principal investigator on a recent project, Build and Broaden: African American Family Relationship Research through Partnerships with HBCUs, aimed at building research partnerships between minority-serving institutions (MSIs) and Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). This project was a collaborative endeavor involving the University of Minnesota, Iowa State University, and Tuskegee University.

Dr. Bryant is a relationship researcher. During the initial years of her career, she developed a conceptual model depicting the developmental roots of intimate relationships. Later in her career, she developed a complex conceptual model depicting factors impacting African American marriages. With that later model in mind, most of her scholarship now focuses on the manner in which sociocultural factors are linked to marital functioning and health outcomes of African American couples. Dr. Bryant’s work has furthered our understanding of African American couples.

Dr. Bryant has amassed an impressive record of scholarship, including two books and more than 60 peer-reviewed articles/book chapters. Her program of research has secured more than $8.5 million in external funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and other top agencies. She has served on editorial boards for NCFR’s journals, as well as other top journals in the family field. Dr. Bryant has been recognized for her research contributions with many accolades including NCFR’s Reuben Hill Award, and the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR) New Contributions Award.  She was also an inaugural Ambiguous Loss Scholar at the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Bryant’s support and involvement with students and junior scholars has been widely recognized. In fact, Dr. Bryant was the most recent co-recipient of the NCFR Felix Berardo Scholarship Award in 2022. Her work for NCFR includes serving as the chair of the Inclusion and Diversity Committee as well as secretary/treasurer of the Ethnic Minority Section (now known as Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Families Section). In addition to sustained involvement in the annual conference program, she has served on review panels and search committees for NCFR.

Dr. Bryant earned her doctorate in child development and family relationships from the University of Texas at Austin. Her master’s degree in science education and bachelor’s degree in biology were both awarded by the University of South Florida. Before beginning her first faculty appointment, she was a National Institute of Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellow in Family Risk and Resilience. Shortly before beginning her faculty appointment at the University of Minnesota, she was a Program Director for the National Science Foundation’s Developmental Science Program in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences.

Her integration of teaching, research, and administration has meaningfully impacted national organizations, Family Science researchers, faculty, students, and her home institution.

NCFR Fellows are nominated by their peers and are selected by the NCFR Fellows Committee. Dr. Bryant will be recognized as a new fellow at the 2023 NCFR Annual Conference, Nov. 8-11 in Orlando, Florida.

The National Council on Family Relations is the premier professional association for the multidisciplinary understanding of families. NCFR has a membership of nearly 3,000 family researchers, practitioners and educators. For more information on the National Council on Family Relations or its scholarly publications, contact NCFR at 1-888-781-9331 or visit its website at www.ncfr.org.