Lisa Brown defends dissertation in August

Autumn beckons … and this September--if all goes as planned--Lisa Brown will leave Badger country and head south to where a Tar Heel is the logo of choice. By mid-August, Brown will have completed her requirements for her doctoral degree in nursing-- to be conferred the end of August 2004--and will be starting postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She will join academia’s upper echelon by adding “PhD” to her credentials. But what makes Brown’s achievement even more noteworthy is the fact that she is the first African American to graduate from the UW-Madison School of Nursing (SoN) doctoral program—a milestone soon to be emblazoned in the school’s history.

Although her academic achievement is greatly lauded by the school, the university, her colleagues and research mentor Karen Pridham, PhD, Brown is reticent to draw attention of any kind to her success. Her modest—almost diffident—demeanor matches her soft-spoken view.

“I don’t like to think of things as ‘firsts,’” Brown explains, “but rather as ‘in-roads.’”

How she got to where she is going

Brown recalls that her first inclination toward nursing materialized at quite a young age—all her dolls sported bandages of some kind … tourniquets, arm slings or band-aids. Her mother’s career as an X-ray technician at Evangelical Deaconess in Milwaukee sparked Brown’s interest in health care. But what gave Brown her direction in nursing came from her sister’s giving birth to a preterm baby, or “a preemie,” causing Brown to focus on the infant’s care.

In college at UW-Milwaukee, Brown became involved in a weekend program at a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and loved it. She also dedicated her time to the House of Peace, which is a community health center where issues on health promotion, disease prevention, senior population, and other health issues are examined. While working on her master’s in nursing, and continuing to divide her time between the NICU and the community center, Brown met Pridham, who came to the center to learn from mothers about feeding practices with infants. Pridham, a nationally known scholar and researcher at the School of Nursing (SoN), fed Brown’s passion for learning about preterm infants and the complications embedded in feeding processes. Brown then pursued the opportunity to work with the researcher in the school’s doctoral program.

Brown’s research has centered on infants born before the 35th week of pregnancy and distress-free feeding regimens for mother and child once they are released from the hospital. Brown videotaped moms feeding their babies, via breast or bottle, to assess mood of the mother during feeding and also monitored the heart rate of the infant to determine distress levels during feeding. Her research objective here at the School of Nursing was to find ways to help the mother relate better to the preterm infant through improved ways of feeding.

Brown’s postdoctoral research at Chapel Hill will be an expansion of her work at the SoN. Her proposal is to examine mother-infant interaction during feeding and to develop an instrument for nurses that signals confusion for mother and baby during feeding, causing increased stress levels in the infant. The tool would serve both nurses and health care provider when assessing maternal interaction.

In a perfect world, says Brown, there would be more teaching provided to parents before the mother and infant are discharged from the hospital. Parents would return home “equipped with the right tools to help the child.”

Obstacles in her path

Brown has met many challenges en route to her doctorate. Her biggest obstacle, she says, was not driven by race, gender, or academic challenges—her biggest obstacle was herself. She notes that her commitment to achieving her PhD was derailed for a time after the loss of her mother—her biggest fan and supporter. But Brown found her way again, through the mentorship and friendship of people like Pridham.

“Karen was a godsend. I am blessed,” says Brown, responding to her own statement that she is the last research student to be mentored by Pridham, who retired from teaching in 2002 and has chosen to limit her research partnerships.

As Brown takes up residence at Chapel Hill, she will be mentored by Sue Thoyre, a past research student of Pridham. That is good news for the UW-Madison School of Nursing: The link to mentor and institution will remain intact.