SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA — The National Council on Family Relations’ (NCFR) Board of Directors has appointed M. Elise Radina, Ph.D., CFLE, to be program chair for the 2023 NCFR Annual Conference, scheduled to be held in Orlando, Florida. The program chair’s primary duties are to select the theme, identify the plenary speakers, and prepare the call for abstracts for a particular year’s conference.

Dr. Radina is the associate dean for faculty development and graduate education in the College of Education, Health, and Society of Miami University. Previously she served as the chair of the college’s Department of Family Science and Social Work. She is a graduate of Allegheny College with a bachelor’s degree in international women’s studies. She earned her master’s of science in Family Life Education from Miami University and her doctorate in human development and family studies from the University of Missouri.

Dr. Radina is a qualitative methodologist whose research focuses broadly on families and health with a particular emphasis on mid- and later-life women in family contexts (e.g., breast cancer survivorship, positive aging, breast cancer-related lymphedema). She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her work has appeared in Cancer Nursing, Family Relations, Journal of Family Nursing, Nursing Research, and Journal of Family Theory & Review. She serves on the editorial board for Journal of Family Theory & Review, and was a guest co-editor for a special issue, Theoretical Innovations in Family Gerontology.  Her co-edited book Real Stories of How Qualitative Data Analysis Happens: Moving Beyond “Themes Emerged” (with Áine Humble) is the 2020 recipient of the Anselm Strauss Award for Qualitative Family Research.

Dr. Radina is an established leader at NCFR, serving in many capacities including chair of the Issues in Aging Focus Group and the Qualitative Family Research Network Focus Group. She has provided leadership to the Family and Health Section beginning as a student representative in 2002 and until her time as chair ended in 2014. She has served on the Conference Program Committee, the Fellows Committee and the Reuben Hill Award and Cindy Winter Scholarship award committees.

Dr. Radina has proposed the 2023 conference theme The Way We Are Now: Families and Communities in the Post-Pandemic Era, to focus on critically examining the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 impacts the lives of families across the globe. Dr. Radina references in her proposal the forward-thinking 1944 NCFR conference theme, Problems Facing the Family in the Post-War Period, and calls our attention to how families and communities have been and continue to be impacted by the “new normal.” This theme invites the question, “how has what may have been necessary and temporary adjustments in how we live our lives become woven into how we now live?”

Dr. Radina has proposed topics including work-life navigation; telehealth; innovations in delivery of Family Life Education; economic inequalities; and interpersonal violence. She has also proposed a focus on how COVID-19 has impacted teaching. Each of these topics is essential to the discipline of Family Science and engaging scholars in these dialogues is crucial to changing the national and international discourse around Family Science and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The NCFR Elections Council was impressed with the depth, breadth, and foci of Dr. Radina’s proposal. In their recommendation to the NCFR Board of Directors, council members wrote that the theme “shows remarkable promise of a conference that will have maximal impact on the body of scholars that will attend.”

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, visit the NCFR website at ncfr.org.