During the fall 2012 semester, students in Cheryl Cheek's Adult Development and Aging class (HDFS 249) had the experience of learning about aging from those who are experiencing it. The 21 undergraduate students visited Quincy Village retirement community five times where they were paired with residents who became their Learning Partners. These partnerships allowed both groups to better understand the other's reality.

The students learned about topics related to aging in class and then went to Quincy Village to interview their Learning Partners about those topics. For example, when they learned the Life Course Theory of development, students interviewed their Learning Partners about their lives. Then the students wrote papers combining the classroom information with the real life experiences they learned about in the interviews. In the same way, when students learned about cognition (thinking), they did activities that involved memory with their Learning Partners and interviewed them about their memories.

David Almeida, professor of human development in Penn State's College of Health and Human Development, will present the 2011 Pattishall Research Lecture. His lecture, "The Speedometer of Life: Daily Stress, Health, and Well-Being," will be given at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 30, in the Bennett Pierce Living Center, 110 Henderson Building on the University Park campus. The event, sponsored by the College of Health and Human Development, is free and open to the public.

For centuries, the brain has been the subject of countless philosophical and scientific debates. Recently, many discoveries and theories have cropped up around how the brain works, and those theories are helping us better understand the brain's role in health and behavior. Faculty members in the College of Health and Human Development are advancing several subfields of neuroscience research, looking at topics that include aggression, movement and iron deficiency.

Fred Vondracek retired on June 30, 2010, after a 41-year tenure at Penn State. Now a professor emeritus of human development, Vondracek had a profound impact on the people he worked with and on the University as a whole. He held a multitude of academic leadership roles, helped shape and build a department and a college, broadened Penn State's international reach and paved the way to improve work-life balance for Penn State employees.

Penn State and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have joined forces to help people quit smoking. Penn State's Methodology Center is providing expertise with innovative research methodology at the Tobacco Intervention Laboratory, a newly established research laboratory that is housed within the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention (UW-CTRI). Penn State received over $700,000 for this study.

Penn State researchers are examining how stress at work impacts employees and their families using a data collection method known as the "daily diary." Susan McHale, professor of human development and director of Penn State's Social Science Research Institute, and three other investigators on the multisite Work, Family & Health Network presented data at a congressional briefing in October. McHale's presentation focused on studying the effects of workplace stress using a daily diary.