MINNEAPOLIS — The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) is pleased to announce that Dr. Katia Paz Goldfarb has been appointed Program Chair for the 2019 NCFR Annual Conference, to be held in Fort Worth, Texas. The program chair's primary duties are to select the theme, prepare the call for abstracts for that year's conference, and to identify plenary speakers.

Dr. Goldfarb's multidisciplinary background includes degrees in Education (B.A., Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), and M.A., Eastern Michigan University) and Family and Child Ecology (Ph.D., Michigan State University). Dr. Goldfarb is currently Professor and Chair in the Department of Family and Child Studies at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey.

An NCFR member for over 20 years, she has been an active participant in NCFR programs and leadership, is a well-respected scholar with extensive expertise and international reputation who has made interdisciplinary contributions to the field of family science. At NCFR, Dr. Goldfarb has been actively involved in a variety of sections and committees, including the Advancing Family Science, International, and Ethnic Minorities Sections, among others. Her scholarly interests include Latino immigrant families and school relationships and the under-representation of ethnic minority families in family journals.

Dr. Goldfarb's proposed conference theme is Family Sustainability: Contextualizing Relationships within Evolving Systems, which focuses on understanding the ever-complex reality of family relationships from within. It stresses the importance of acknowledging, and working with, the supports that already exist within and outside the family, with the goal of continuing to support families in sustaining their unit.The theme is intended to build on the one that precedes it (Globalization) by bringing attention to the processes of family relationships as they unfold in a growing array of family forms.

The National Council on Family Relations is the premier professional association for the multidisciplinary understanding of families. NCFR has a membership of more than 3,300 family researchers, practitioners and educators. For more information on the National Council on Family Relations or its scholarly publications, visit the NCFR website at ncfr.org.