SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA — The National Council on Family Relations’ (NCFR) Board of Directors has appointed Brad van Eeden-Moorefield, Ph.D., CFLE, to be program chair for the 2020 NCFR Annual Conference, scheduled to be held in St. Louis. 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. van Eeden-Moorefield is an associate professor and the director of the Family Science and Human Development Ph.D. program at Montclair State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has made critical contributions to the field of Family Science in the area of stepfamilies, and has conducted extensive research on LGBTQ+ populations.

Dr. van Eeden-Moorefield is an established leader at NCFR, serving in many capacities including as an elected member of the NCFR Board of Directors, and as a member of the editorial board of Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Science. Dr. van Eeden-Moorefield is a rare scholar with expertise in both practice and research. He has an MSW from a joint program between the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and North Carolina A&T State University, and is sensitive to practitioner issues. He is also an excellent researcher, and prolific author, having just published two books this year, Contemporary Families at the Nexus of Research and Practice, and Designing and Proposing Your Research Project, the latter of which is aimed at students and new professionals.

Dr. van Eeden-Moorefield has proposed the theme “Family Expansions, Expanding Families: Contouring Family Science’s Negative Spaces” for the 2020 conference, suggesting a focus on the past, present, and future of families, with a nod to the Gateway Arch of St. Louis, built as a symbol of the westward expansion.

The NCFR Elections Council was impressed with Dr. van Eeden-Moorefield’s innovative ideas to make sessions more active, and have a conference “in which we create rather than receive knowledge,” as stated in his proposal. In their recommendation to the NCFR Board of Directors, council members wrote that Dr. van Eeden-Moorefield’s proposal “will continue to establish this annual conference as the professional conference where ‘family’ is the central gathering place of experts in the family field.”

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.