Minneapolis, MN – The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) has conferred its organization’s Ernest Burgess Award to Dr. Rand Conger, Distinguished Professor at University of California-Davis. The award will be presented November 1, 2012 at NCFR’s annual conference in Phoenix, AZ.

The purpose of the Burgess Award is to recognize a distinguished career in the field of family research and scholarship. The award is given in memory of Ernest W. Burgess, University of Chicago, an NCFR co-founder and fourth president. Dr. Burgess was a pioneer in his contributions to marriage and family research in America.

Dr. Conger is a prolific scholar best known for his work on the effects of economic hardship on parenting,   family processes, and child and adolescent development. As his primary scholarly contribution, Professor Conger formulated and tested the highly influential Family Stress Model which postulates that economic hardship disrupts both the marital relationship and effective parenting practices, which in turn negatively impact the socioemotional development of children and adolescents. Professor Conger and his colleagues developed the Family Stress Model with the Family Transitions Project in Iowa, a study of over 500 Euro-American families who were experiencing the farm crisis in the late 1980s, a longitudinal study that continues to this day. Professor Conger and his colleagues extended this research with two additional long-term longitudinal studies, the Family and Community Health Study, a study of over 890 African-American families living in Iowa and Georgia, and the California Families Project, a study of 674 Mexican-origin families in central California.

Professor Conger has garnered over $50 million in extramural grant support. He has also served key leadership positions in the field, by chairing a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study section, serving as member on NIH and National Institute of Mental Health strategic planning committees that developed institutional priorities for research. He currently serves at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a panel focused on disrupting intergenerational transmission of child abuse and neglect and on a World Bank-sponsored panel on children in crisis.

The National Council on Family Relations is the nation’s premier professional association for the multidisciplinary understanding of families. NCFR has a membership of over 3600 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 .