Military Children’s Family Relationships

Shelley M. MacDermid Wadsworth is a Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family Science at Purdue University, where she directs the Military Family Research Institute, which she co-founded, and serves as Director Emerita of the Center for Families. Dr. MacDermid Wadsworth holds an M.B.A. in Management and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Human Development and Family Studies from The Pennsylvania State University. Her primary research interest is the relationship between work conditions and family life, with special focus on military families. She is an author of over 140 articles and chapters. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health; the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Agriculture; state governments; and numerous private philanthropies. She has served on federal advisory committees for the National Academies of Science and the Department of Defense, and has testified in Congress on multiple occasions regarding military and veteran families. Dr. MacDermid Wadsworth is a recipient of the Morrill Award, Purdue University’s highest faculty honor, for outstanding career achievements that have had an impact on society. She is a fellow of the National Council on Family Relations, from which she also received the Felix Berardo Scholarship Award for Mentoring (2018) and the Burgess Award for continuous and meritorious contributions to theory and research in the family field (2022). She has been named a “Top Ten Extraordinary Contributor” and in 2024 received a lifetime achievement award for contributions to work-family research worldwide.

Shawn D. Whiteman is the Interim Dean of the Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services and Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Utah State University. He received his B.A. (Shippensburg University) and M.A. (Wake Forest University) degrees in Psychology and his Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies (The Pennsylvania State University).  After spending the first 11 years of his career in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Purdue University, he joined the faculty in HDFS at Utah State University in 2016. Broadly, Shawn conducts research on the connections between family socialization processes and youth’s health and socioemotional adjustment. He is specifically interested in how siblings directly and indirectly act as sources of social influence and social comparison within families and how their family experiences foster similarities and differences in their relationship qualities, attributes, and health-related behaviors. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Department of Defense.

Leanne K. Knobloch (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin – Madison) is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois and co-chair of the Science Advisory Board of the Military Child Education Coalition. Her research examines how military families communicate across the deployment cycle. Her scholarship has been honored by the Golden Anniversary Monograph Award from the National Communication Association and the Biennial Article Award from the International Association for Relationship Research. Her research on military and Veteran families has been funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Institute (PCORI). She was recently named a University Scholar, which is the highest honor bestowed by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recognizing outstanding research, teaching, and public engagement. She is a fellow of both the International Association for Relationship Research and the International Communication Association.