Researcher | Research Overview
My long-term goal is to improve the physical and mental health outcomes of former premature infants and their families. My previous work has focused on understanding the emotional burden and psychosocial experiences of families with preterm infants during and after discharge from the newborn intensive care unit (NICU). Some subjects I have explored include health care resource utilization such as hospital readmission, coping strategies exercised by NICU mothers, parental NICU discharge preparedness, former preterm infant growth/neurodevelopment, and adaptation to parenthood. I have tried to explore how physiology and social/environmental factors interact to produce the observed phenotypes. Recently, my interest in how we prepare families for to care for their former preterm infants at home has become a major focus.
Researcher | Research Background
Throughout my medical career I have been committed to research. During medical school at Stanford University, I was interested in immunology research. During my pediatric residency at Children’s Hospital Boston and Boston Medical Center, I learned to expand the bounds of our medical knowledge and to formulate a systematic approach to solving problems. I used this knowledge during my fellowship projects in the Harvard Neonatal-Perinatal Fellowship. I also obtained a position in the Harvard Pediatric Health Service Research Fellowship. During this program, which overlapped with my neonatology fellowship, I completed my MPH at the Harvard School for Public Health, studying maternal-child health, clinical research design, regression analysis, instrument design, survey administration, and statistical analysis of large data sets using SAS.