Constance "Connie" MILBRATH

Constance Milbrath

Connie's 2021 Autobiography

After HS, I went west to college to continue my “career” as a competitive swimmer with the (then) famous Santa Clara Swim Club. After one year, and a real drubbing by a 10-year-old (Lillian) Pokey Watson (1964 & 1968 Olympic Gold medalist), I knew I wasn’t in Connecticut anymore. Post BA I earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from the U. of Wisconsin (Madison) in (Developmental) Psychology, and spent the following year as a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at MIT before returning to the west coast and settling in San Francisco.

I met my husband in San Francisco and we spent the next 30 + years in the Bay Area, settling for much of that time in the east bay to raise our two children. Sadly, our son Max passed away in 2006. Our daughter, is a professional musician (violin, viola, composer) and lives in the Boulder area with her musician husband (mandolin, guitar, composer) and our grandson (violin). She and her husband teach, spend summers touring with their main band (www.taarka.com), and produce and perform with various other musical projects.

During our years in the Bay area I had the delightful fortune of running into a number of our Staples classmates: Most significantly Karen Olson who became a close buddy through our regular swims at the UCBerkeley Julia Morgan pool, and was pivotal in our local Staples reunions. Thea Vierling, Gail Shuman, Kelly Kartsen (Smith), Karen and I met at least annually for a number of years. Evan Harrar joined us on quite a few occasions, as well as others who happened through the area (Bill H., Doug Richman, Eva Acquino...), usually at Bucci’s, a wonderful Italian restaurant in Emeryville, now closed, of which Karen is a part owner.

My academic career has been spent largely in research at UCSF with some teaching there and at other UC and Bay area campuses. My research has been quite varied but always intellectually engaging. Perhaps because my children were talented in the arts, I spent a goodly number of years studying development in talented child artists. During the years I spent as part of the McArthur program in psychiatry at UCSF I studied spousal loss and the therapeutic process of recovery. Later on, I began to focus on the role of culture in development; in shaping the mental models with which culturally distinct high school adolescents engage in romantic relationship. In 2006, I had the opportunity to come north to the west coast of Canada and join a research group at the University of British Columbia doing research to improve the lives of young children and in my more recent research culture as a vital support for school age immigrant children to succeed academically in school, even when living in families with few resources and in relatively impoverished neighborhoods.

Connie’s Update (2021)

My husband and I became Canadian Citizens in 2010 and still retain our US citizenship and a small residence in Sacramento. We moved from Vancouver that year as well to Vancouver Island. Since I work in research, I was able to work remotely with bimonthly visits to Vancouver for meetings. I retired in 2014 and am now Honorary in the School of Population and Public Health at UBC and continue to work with my colleagues at HELP http://earlylearning.ubc.ca/. My husband is also retired. We love living on Vancouver Island and continue to enjoy reasonable health.