Research Spotlight
Emma V. Clark, PhD (c), is a third-year PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. Her research stems from her interest in how regulation of midwives (e.g., licensure, oversight of training curricula, development and enforcement of scopes of work, and requirements for ongoing practice) affect how many midwives are working in a country, the quality of maternal health care, and overall maternal health outcomes (e.g., maternal mortality and rates of postpartum hemorrhage, eclampsia, and sepsis). Regulation has been suggested as a factor that can affect maternal health outcomes, mostly through the effects that it has on how well midwives are integrated into the health system, or how able they are to provide all the health services they are trained and authorized to provide, and have strong interprofessional collaboration (e.g., with nurses and doctors). However, no one has really attempted to quantify this relationship. This is where Clark’s research is trying to fill in the knowledge gap. She is using existing data that was collected as part of a large survey of midwives' associations in most low- and middle-income countries, to assign a single score to a country's midwifery regulatory environment and then look at the relationship between this score and various indicators of access, quality, and overall outcomes that are routinely collected in these countries. Read more...
Deonni Stolldorf PhD, RN, is one of Vanderbilt University School of Nursing’s research scientists, and tenure-track Assistant Professor. Stolldorf's research focuses on discovering how to best implement and sustain complex, multi-level, interdisciplinary healthcare interventions. Her frequent partnership with clinical researchers serves to advance both clinical interventions and the field of Implementation Science, with the goal to better understand the context of intervention implementation, customize approaches for success, and determine key drivers of sustainability. Currently, she's working on implementing two interventions for heart failure patients in the emergency department, and a clinical decision-support tool to assist pharmacists with medication reconciliation. Stolldorf is also developing a measure to assess intervention sustainability, which will be available to future researchers also working to advance the field of Implementation Science. Read more...
Lori Schirle, PhD, CRNA, is an Assistant Professor at VUSN. Her research aims at understanding how to best achieve effective pain management in surgical populations, while minimizing the risk of opioids. Currently, Schirle is investigating how a person’s underlying pain sensitivity influences their opioid use after total knee replacement. “Everyone has an underlying pain sensitivity,” states Schirle, “and this is highly variable among people. We’ve all known people who are sensitive to the smallest stimuli (think Princess and the Pea), and others who are hardly bothered by (what we might consider) big injuries.” This variation, according to Schirle, is largely driven by genetics. Through the measuring of pain sensitivity and genetics before and after knee replacement, Schirle and her team are trying to determine if underlying pain sensitivity can explain opioid use after surgery. Can genetic differences also explain these pain sensitivity variances? That’s what she’s trying to find out. Read more...
Amy Campbell, PhD(c), RN, CPNP-PC, is a third-year PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. During her years working as a pediatric nurse practitioner in primary care, she observed many mothers struggling with feeding their infants. Some of these infants went on to be diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, which lead her to inquiring if we can identify symptoms of ASD by examining feeding behaviors in the first 12 months of life. Read more...
Dr. Nadia Markie Sneed - 2/13/2023
Nadia Markie Sneed, PhD, is in her first year as a Postdoctoral Fellow at VUSN. Before Sneed became a nurse, she obtained her first bachelor’s degree in nutrition science from the University of Tennessee. Ever since, she has always made nutrition a key component of her clinical practice as both a bedside nurse and family nurse practitioner and also in her career as a nurse researcher. Read more...
