Preston A. Britner, Ph.D. is a Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is Co-Chair of the UConn’s Public Engagement Forum, which leads the University’s outreach and public engagement efforts. He also holds joint appointments in Educational Psychology and the Ph.D. program in Public Health. Professor Britner is a University Teaching Fellow (the highest teaching honor at UConn) and was recognized by UConn’s AAUP chapter with the 2011 Service Excellence award for his professional contributions. He holds several editorial appointments and numerous administrative and elected positions at university, state, and national levels. He is Editor Emeritus of The Journal of Primary Prevention. He has published in areas that bring child development and parent-child relationship theory and research to applied settings, mostly geared toward the promotion of healthy interactions and the prevention of negative behavioral outcomes.

My research is in the sociology of families and public policy. I have published books and articles on topics such as marriage and divorce, children's well-being, intergenerational relations, family policy, and welfare policy. I am the principal investigator of the "Three-City Study," an interdisciplinary study of low-income children and their caregivers in the post-welfare-reform era. The study’s web site includes downloadable documents that describe the study and a searchable list of publications. The data from all three survey waves of our study are publicly available through Sociometrics and ICPSR.

I am also the author of a textbook in the sociology of the family, Public and Private Families: An Introduction (Sixth edition, McGraw-Hill, 2010); and a companion reader, Public and Private Families: A Reader (Sixth edition, McGraw-Hill 2010).

My most recent book is The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family Today (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

Carolyn Pape Cowan is Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley where she is co-director of 3 longitudinal preventive intervention projects: Becoming a Family, Schoolchildren and Their Families, and Supporting Father Involvement. Dr. Cowan has published widely in the professional literature on family relationships, family transitions, and the evaluation of preventive interventions. She is co-editor of Fatherhood today: Men's Changing Role in the Family (Wiley, 1988) and The Family Context of Parenting in the Child's Adaptation to School (Erlbaum, 2005), and co-author with Phil Cowan of When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples (Erlbaum, 2000), which has been translated into 6 languages. Prof. Cowan consults widely on the development, training, and evaluation of interventions for parents.

Lawrence H. Ganong, Ph.D., is Professor of Nursing and Human Development and Family Studies. Ganong has been at MU for nearly 30 years. He is a leading authority on remarriage and stepfamily dynamics, having conducted research on stepfamilies for over three decades. He has authored or co-authored seven books and over 180 articles and book chapters. Many of these publications were written with his wife and colleague, Marilyn Coleman. In addition to publishing in academic journals, Ganong has written for popular magazines and conducted many workshops about remarriage and stepparenting in the United States and Great Britain.

Ganong has a joint appointment between Nursing and Human development and Family Studies. His research interests are multidisciplinary. Consequently, he has published his research in the journals of several disciplines, including nursing, family studies, psychology, sociology, health education, and counseling.