The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) is proud to recognize Athena Chung Yin Chan, M.S., as the 2022 recipient of the NCFR Student Award, which is given to an NCFR graduate student member who has demonstrated excellence as a student and shows great potential for contributing to Family Science. 

Ms. Chan is a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota in family social science. She earned her bachelor’s degree in business administration from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and earned her master’s in psychology from the University of Hong Kong.

Ms. Chan is committed to a research career focused on understanding stress, coping, and resilience over the life course. Her interests in this area were piqued by the COVID-19 pandemic which began soon after initiating her doctoral studies. As an international student from Hong Kong, she recognized that the global pandemic was a unique opportunity to study cross-cultural resilience processes in families. With a grounding in family theories, she has theoretically and empirically examined coping and adaptation processes in response to different family stressors, including childhood adversities, family caregiving, and elder family financial exploitation in diverse families and cultures.

Ms. Chan's study, Resilience and Mental Health in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Mixed Methods Study of Adults in Minnesota and Hong Kong, uses a longitudinal quantitative design combined with an intensive qualitative investigation. This research adds nuanced cultural understanding to existing theories on family resilience mechanisms. Ms. Chan presented this study at the 2022 NCFR Annual Conference.

Ms. Chan’s timely findings have the potential to illuminate both what is universal about successful coping and what may be culturally unique. Her work contributes to our understanding of how to best support individuals and families across cultures and regionally when faced with global challenges. Overall, Ms. Chan has published over 20 peer-reviewed journal articles in prominent Family Science, gerontology, and psychology journals.

In her letter of nomination, Catherine Solheim, Ph.D., writes, “Without hesitation, I can state that Athena has the strongest scholarship record in year three of her doctoral program than any other doctoral student I’ve encountered in my two decades of faculty work in Family Social Science." Dr. Solheim added that in conclusion, Ms. Chan "has demonstrated the scholarly excellence and shows the high potential for contribution to the Family Science discipline that this NCFR Student Award seeks to honor.”

Ms. Chan was recognized for her achievement during a plenary at the 2022 NCFR Annual Conference.

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.