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Through his research in pain detection, Martin Schiavenato of the University of Rochester’s School of Nursing is developing a tool to help health care providers more accurately assess pain in infants, young children and people with dementia who cannot articulate their pain. His Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Nurse Faculty Scholar research will support this work.

The prestigious Nurse Faculty Scholar award includes a grant of $350,000, which Maren Coffman will use to study the correlation between health literacy—an understanding of health care and the health care system—and diabetes among Latinas. Coffman is an assistant professor at the School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Having explored cardiology and genetics for more than 18 years, Columbia University’s Kathleen Hickey will use her three-year Nurse Faculty Scholar grant to further her research on genetic mutations that may predispose individuals to a higher possibility of sudden cardiac death. “Knowing ahead of time that a genetic predisposition exists could allow us to step up our preventative efforts,” she says.

Selected as one of just 15 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Nurse Faculty Scholars this year, Janice Goodman of the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions is using her grant to provide early intervention to encourage healthy mother/infant bonding for first time mothers who are at high risk of developing postpartum depression. The goal is to reduce postpartum depression and its negative effects on child development.