2022 Research Summit Participants

Amy has over 20 years of nursing experience. Her undergraduate degree was earned from the University of Saint Joseph and master's degree from the University of Connecticut. She practiced for a number of years as a bedside NICU nurse in Connecticut before enjoying other roles as a nurse manager and within the industry as a clinical consultant. Amy returned to clinical practice as a NICU staff nurse to reconnect with caring for vulnerable infants and their families. Recognizing the immense stress and pain experienced by NICU infants, she became inspired to conduct research focused on improving both outcomes for these patients and their families. Her doctoral dissertation at the University of Connecticut was titled "Infant Exposure to Potentially Traumatic Events in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit". This study provided the foundation for future work investigating neurodevelopmental associations with stress, pain and parent-infant separation experiences in the NICU, all of which have the potential for long-term consequences. Amy believes the NICU experience has the potential to be traumatic for some infants and has described the context for this in Infant Medical Trauma in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (IMTN): A Proposed Concept for Science and Practice. During a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of South Florida, Amy studied the implications of NICU stress exposure on the developing gut microbiome. She also examined NICU stress exposure and skin cortisol. Each of her bench science investigations have been aimed at improving our understanding of molecular impacts from early life stress exposure. As faculty at the University of Rhode Island, Amy has pivoted her research towards adult survivors of preterm birth. In the only U.S.-based longitudinal study of adults born preterm, Amy is an NIH R01 co-investigator helping to examine allostatic load and epigenetic markers, physical and psychological health, adaptive and executive function, work, and social competence in the 10th study wave.

Dr. Christine "Chris" Fortney is an assistant professor in the Martha S. Pitzer Center for Women, Children, and Youth at The Ohio State University College of Nursing. Dr. Fortney has built a program of research based on the study of the experiences of critically-ill infants in the NICU and their families. Through the use of descriptive data, behavioral observations, and qualitative interviews, she has highlighted the trajectories of symptoms and suffering, as well as how perceptions of symptoms and suffering influence decision-making and changes in goals of care for both infants and their parents. She has also highlighted challenges to the identification and management of symptoms in critically-ill infants in the NICU, developed a framework to evaluate the quality of neonatal death, and published patient-reported symptom data in this population.