Helping Babies Feed Stress-Free Jinhee Park’s mission to improve the care of preterm infants Just because feeding is one of the first things we do in life doesn’t mean it’s simple. To the contrary, feeding is a feat of such complexity and skill that many healthy newborns struggle to feed at all. For babies born prematurely at less than 37 weeks of gestation, that struggle is more prevalent, consequential, and enduring: the stress and nutritional deficiency that feeding difficulties frequently produce can hinder neurological development and inflict long-lasting harm. Luckily, Jinhee Park, Ph.D., RN, an assistant professor at the Connell School of Nursing, is working to help these babies and their families. “Throughout my career,” she explains, “my research has focused on understanding feeding problems in infants and young children to improve their health.” That career started more than two decades ago, when Park, then a Assistant Professor Jinhee Park
master’s student in nursing, was working in one of the largest newborn intensive care units (NICU) in Seoul, South Korea. From there she moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her doctoral work and, in 2015, to Boston College to join the faculty at the Connell School. This summer, her years of effort paid off in a satisfying way: she received an R21 Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
By Nathaniel Moore 10 voice | fall 2021
and National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR).
