The Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN) presented the Kimberly-Clark Huggies Nursing Research Award to Marliese Nist, RNC-NIC, MS, for her work entitled, “Inflammatory Mediators of Stress Exposure and Neurodevelopment in Very Preterm Infants.” The award is supported through an educational grant from the Kimberly-Clark Corporation and was presented at the 2018 AWHONN National Convention in Tampa, Florida. Nist is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University College of Nursing.
Nist has also recently been awarded a 2018 grant from the National Association of Neonatal Nurses (NANN) and was one of six nurses selected nationally to receive a Heilbrunn Nurse Scholar Award. The Heilbrunn Nurse Scholar Award is given by The Rockefeller University’s Heilbrunn Family Center for Research Nursing to support nurses while they pursue independent research projects that will make a significant contribution to the discipline of nursing. The award provides a maximum of $25,000 for one or two years. Funding for the awards, now in their fifth year, is from an endowment established by sisters Helaine Lerner and Joan Rechnitz in honor of their parents, Harriet and Robert Heilbrunn.
In her doctoral research at Ohio State, Nist has been analyzing the relationships between stress exposure during the NICU hospitalization period, inflammation and neurodevelopment. Nist saw a need for study of the 28-31 week old population of preterm infants, which is responsible for a large percentage of population neurodevelopment impairments, but has not been subject to as much study as early preterm infants.
