By Madelyn Braho · Staff Writer
Kristin Homan earned Omnicom Delta Kappa’s (ODK) Professor of the Year award on the eve of her retirement.
Homan is a professor of psychology and has been teaching at the school for 13 years. She has been a resident of Grove City for 35 years with her husband, Timothy Homan, the 2002 recipient of the ODK Professor of the Year award.
In her time here, Homan taught a variety of psychology courses.
“At a small school, you teach a lot of different things, and it’s actually pretty great, because you get to change up what you do,” Homan said.
She has taught abnormal psychology and adult development classes, with a recent focus on statistics and research methods. Intro courses are some of her favorites.
“I just get to teach (students) about the best, most exciting, Fun stuff,” she said. “And then they take another psych class and come to realize ‘oh, it’s not quite as clear cut as it was presented in Psych 101.’”
Homan has written and published many research papers at Grove City, and her recent work has focused on a data set she worked with in Wisconsin on sabbatical. In 2018, she took a position as a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Homan set out with a particular aim.
“My goal, and I achieved it, was to get proficient with this big, national longitudinal data set,” she explained.
MIDUS, or Midlife in the United States, is a study that follows thousands of individuals over decades, gathering data on health and aging. Homan focuses on her work with this data set: how early adversity affects someone later in life.
“The most interesting stuff I’ve done is looked at how current relationships can help to almost make up for or undo some of those long-term deficits,” she said.
Looking back at her time at Grove City, her favorite moments “all come down to interactions with students and colleagues.
“I can think of so many times where we shared a laugh and had a great conversation or just connected in some way,” she said. “A lot of them are maybe kind of ordinary, everyday kinds of things, but there’s something in some of them that happened or just connected in some way,” she said.
Homan and her husband will be retiring at the end of this school year, keeping Grove City as a home base, but taking time to travel.
“We wanted to have some years while we still have some energy to go visit the kids and just do some other stuff,” she said.
“We have signed up to do a bicycle tour in Vermont in October. And that will be the first time we feel retired. We’ve been spoiled, we’re used to having our summers off, but we’ve never been able to do something in October,” said Homan.
The Homans have taken biking tours for years and have made friends along the way.
