Valarie King, Associate Professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University, will deliver the 2009 Charles B. Nam Lecture, "Family Structure, Father Involvement and Child Well-Being," in the Starry Conference Room (214 Rovetta Business Building) from 2:00-3:30 pm on Friday, February 27th.

As a National Science Foundation Fellow, Professor King completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993 with a dissertation on father involvement in parenting and its effect on children's well-being. After a post-doctoral research fellowship from the National Institute on Aging conducted at UNC Chapel Hill, she joined the faculty at Penn State in 1996 and earned tenure there in 2002. She is author or co-author of 28 articles in professional journals, most often the Journal of Marriage and the Family, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Family Issues and the Journal of Marriage and the Family. Professor King has been Principal Investigator on research grants from the MacArthur and Brookdale Foundations in addition to her currently-active R01 research grant on nonresident father involvement from the National Institutes of Health (2003-2009).