The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) has conferred its prestigious Fellow status for 2020 on Ted G. Futris, Ph.D., CFLE, professor of Human Development and Family Science (HDFS) and state extension family life specialist at the University of Georgia.

Since earning his Ph.D. in HDFS from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2000, Dr. Futris has provided statewide and national leadership in creating resources to inform best practices in relationship education program development and implementation. As the director of the Couples and Relationship Enrichment (CARE) laboratory at UGA, his current work is focused on community capacity building to support healthy couple and marital relationships, youth-focused relationship education, and evaluating the efficacy of educational programming on couple, parenting, and child well-being. Dr. Futris’ work, which integrates research with outreach programming, has been funded in excess of $27 million from federal and state grants.

Dr. Futris has made outstanding contributions to NCFR and the discipline of Family Science through a long history of published scholarship in NCFR journals, presentations at the annual conference, and organizing symposia for NCFR. Dr. Futris is notably collaborative in his approach and his work has resulted in nationally distributed products and curricula that bridge family research, teaching, and practice.

In 2018, Dr. Futris was a co-recipient (along with NCFR Fellow Francesca Adler-Baeder, Ph.D., CFLE) of NCFR’s Margaret E. Arcus Family Life Educator Award, in recognition of their work with a multi-state extension team on developing resources and best practices in marriage education. In 2019, he was named the editor of NCFR’s Family Focus, and he has put his vast experience to work as an accomplished researcher and educator in determining relevant topics to pursue and identifying a variety of voices and perspectives for its articles.

In his nomination letter, Jay A. Mancini, Ph.D., extols Dr. Futris’ many virtues that align with NCFR Fellowship, including that he is an applied Family Scientist, “conducting research with the end in mind targeted to prevention and intervention;” that his programmatic work “is timely, relevant, and adopted widely;” and finally that Dr. Futris is “student-centered, as reflected in the number of graduate students he has brought into his research and his family program work.”

Fellow status in NCFR is an honor awarded to living members on the basis of their outstanding contributions to the discipline of Family Science. NCFR Fellows are nominated by their peers and are selected by the NCFR Fellows Committee. Dr. Futris will be recognized as a new Fellow at the 2021 NCFR Annual Conference, scheduled for Nov. 3–6 in Baltimore, Maryland.

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, contact NCFR at 1-888-781-9331 or visit its website at www.ncfr.org.