2008 Summit
2008 ISCE SUMMIT
Societal and Individual Transformation:
Building Cross-National Research Capacity in Human Development
Virginia Tech Center for European Studies and Architecture
Riva San Vitale, Switzerland
September 28-30, 2008

An international summit to advance understanding of the nuances and contexts of societal and individual transformation and to further inquiry into change, including its antecedents, processes, and consequences.
Summit Goals:
- Facilitate relationships between Virginia Tech developmental science faculty with their counterparts in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland
- Explore opportunities for inter-university, cross-national research collaboration
- Initiate a blueprint for future research collaboration
- Produce a collection of papers focused on human development, transformation, and change to be published as an edited book
Virginia Tech Sponsors:
Institute for Society, Culture and Environment
Office of Outreach and International Affairs
Office of the Vice President for Research
ISCE Summit Coordinators:
Karen A. Roberto, Interim Director
Jay A. Mancini, Senior Research Fellow
Carlene Arthur, Administrative Assistant
ISCE 2008 Summit Participants
Susan Chuang
![]() |
Susan S. Chuang is an assistant Professor at the University of Guelph, Canada. She has three streams of research: 1) cross-cultural and immigrant families of young children, focusing on parenting and parent-child relationships, fathering, child development; 2) adolescent mental health, delinquency, and risky behaviours; and 3) settlement and immigration issues and how local and national community organizations provide services and programs for children, youth, and families. Susan S. Chuang, Ph.D.
|
Megan Dolbin-MacNab
![]() |
Megan L. Dolbin-MacNab is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development. Her research and theoretical work focuses on systemic approaches to intervention and prevention, the intersection of personal well-being and family dynamics, and grandparent-headed families. Megan L. Dolbin-MacNab, Ph.D., LMFT |
Julie Dunsmore
![]() |
Julie C. Dunsmore is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech. Her work focuses on parental emotion socialization and children's developing social cognition, affective social competence, and prosocial behavior. Julie Dunsmore |
Rosalind Edwards
Rosalind Edwards is Professor in Social Policy and director of the Families & Social Capital Research Group at London South Bank University. Her main research focus is on family lives from the perspective of family members themselves, within and across family and social generations. She is interested in the ways that social divisions and resources shape people's understandings and experiences. For information about Rosalind's and the Families Group's various research projects visit: http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/families For information about Rosalind's publications visit: http://myprofile.cos.com/edwardra Rosalind Edwards |
April Few
![]() |
April L. Few is Associate Professor of family studies in the Department of Human Development at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Her research interests include minority adolescent sexuality, intimate violence, racial-ethnic identity development as contextualized through lifespan and Black feminist theoretical contexts. |
Robbie Gilligan
Research interests include children and young people in state care, family support, men as foster carers, and programmes to combat social disadvantage among young people. Robbie Gilligan |
Janet Holland
![]() |
Janet Holland is Professor of Social Research at London South Bank University. She is co-director of the Families and Social Capital Research Group, and Timescapes: Changing Relationships and Identities through the Life Course, a multi-university, large-scale qualitative longitudinal study. Her research interests include young people, education, gender, intimacy, sexuality, family life, and methodology and she has published widely in these areas. |
Angela Huebner
![]() |
Angela J. Huebner is an associate professor in the Department of Human Development at Virginia Tech. Her research interests focus on understanding changes in adaptation/adjustment in family subsystems during stressful circumstances (e.g. military deployment); she is also interested in exploring how the attachment system intersects with the marital and parent-child dyads over the course of stressful events. |
Kee Jeong Kim
Kee Jeong Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Her major research and teaching interest is in developmental psychopathology. More specifically, she is investigating continuity and change in interlocking trajectories of adolescent externalizing and internalizing problems and in the evolution of antisocial behavior over the life course. She also conducts methodological research such as structural equation modeling of multi-wave, multi-informant data and latent class modeling of categorical data. Kee Jeong Kim |
Leon Kuczynski
Leon Kuczynski is a developmental psychologist and professor at the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition at the University of Guelph, Ontario. His research concerns processes in parent-child interactions and relationships and topics such as socialization, acculturation and relationship formation. He has developed two theoretical frameworks, the bilateral model of parent-child relations and social relational theory, which form his perspective. These emphasize processes such as child as agent, a dialectical conception of bidirectional influence in the family and personal relationships as contexts for parent-child interaction. . Leon Kuczynski |
Susan Lollis
![]() |
Susan Lollis is Professor at the University of Guelph in the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition. Her research and theoretical work focuses on the close relationships that children and adolescents develop with peers, siblings, and parents. She has been particularly interested in the dynamic tensions between affiliation/attachment and individuation/separation in children's/adolescents' close relationships. Presently, she is considering how past interactions and future interactions are represented in present close relationships and the mechanisms of slow and swift change in close relationships. Susan P. Lollis |
Hugh Milroy
Hugh Milroy is Chief Executive of Veterans Aid, a UK based charity which Hugh Milroy |
Bren Neale
Bren Neale's main interests are in life course changes and processes, the sociology of young lives and personal relationships, and the development of qualitative longitudinal (QL) research methods. Bren Neale |
Thomas Ollendick
Thomas H. Ollendick is University Distinguished Professor and Director of the Child Study Center, Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech. His research interests center on developmental psychopathology within a social learning theory framework. As such, he studies diverse childhood psychopathologies including the autism spectrum disorders, and both internalizing (anxiety, depression) and externalizing disorders (attention deficit disorder, conduct disorder), and their familial and social contexts. |
Michèle Preyde
![]() |
Michèle Preyde is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition at the University of Guelph. Her research centres on three main themes: the psychosocial impact of physical and mental illness, practitioner-researcher collaboration, and intervention effectiveness research. Michèle Preyde, RSW |
Virpi Timonen
![]() |
Dr. Virpi Timonen lectures in social policy and is the founding Director of the Social Policy and Ageing Research Centre (SPARC) at the School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin. Her work has focused on the development of long-term care policies in European countries, the structure and delivery of services to older people in the home, community and institutional care settings, the phenomenon of migrant labour in eldercare services, and on older people as sources of support to their families and communities. Further details on the research centre that she directs can be found on www.sparc.tcd.ie, and information on the Irish longitudinal study of ageing (TILDA), where she is one of the Principal Investigators and member of the Steering Committee, is available on www.tilda.ie. Virpi Timonen |
Jay A. Mancini
![]() |
Jay A. Mancini is a senior research fellow at Virginia Tech's Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment, and a professor in the Department of Human Development. His research and theoretical work focuses on prevention and intervention programs, social organization and building community capacity, and vulnerable populations across the lifespan. |
Karen A. Roberto
![]() |
Karen Roberto is Director of the Center for Gerontology and Interim Director of the Institute for Society, Culture & Environment. Her research agenda focuses on the intersection of health and social support in later life. Specifically, Dr. Roberto's primary research examines older women's adaptation to chronic health conditions, family relationships and caregiving, and elder abuse and mistreatment. |
ISCE 2008 Summit Lectures
Please click here to view the lectures relating to the summit (password required).
If you are using Internet Explorer and are experiencing problems with logging in, please use the following procedure to accept the ISCE webpages as trusted sites and get access to the page:
- Select Tools
- In the drop-down menu, select Internet Options
- Select the Security tab
- Select the Trusted Sites zone (the green check)
- Click on the Sites button
- Add the following text to "Add this website to the zone": http://www.isce.vt.edu
- Make sure the "Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone" button is unchecked
- Click on the Add button
- Click on the Close button
- Click on the OK button












