The Heart of Research

Every inch of Maggie McCullom’s southeast Atlanta home reflects a full life.

Family photos line the walls and tabletops. Dozens of potted plants burst with life. Her eyes shine as she talks about church and the nearby recreation center, where she trains for senior Olympic competitions in powerlifting, Tai Chi, basketball and cornhole.

But McCullom understands that not all seniors share her experience.

“I know many seniors who are alone in their homes and don’t have anyone to talk to, visit, or go places with them,” she says. “Some people just don’t know how to say what is going on, but you can look at them and see the sadness within them.”

That’s why she participates in HomePal, a research study led by Associate Professor Jane Chung, PhD, RN, FGSA, that uses smart-speaker technology and AI to assess loneliness among older adults living alone.

Smart speakers and motion sensors track participants like McCullom as they go about their daily routines, collecting data on speech patterns, mobility, sleep habits, and smart speaker usage. Using this data and machine-learning algorithms, Chung’s team can identify individuals at risk for or experiencing loneliness, a condition shown to be as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Chung aims to identify loneliness without requiring seniors to disclose it — a topic often avoided due to stigma or embarrassment, as McCullom observed — and seeks to find interventions that improve social well-being and overall health.

“My goal is to find a way to help people age in place and live independently for as long as possible in their own choice of living environment, like a home or community,” Chung says.

At the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, research is published in academic journals and presented around the world. But it also lives in homes like McCullom’s, as well as in hospitals, clinics, and community organizations — anywhere people are served.

“We do this work because we’re trying to change the course of human health, whether we’re doing that one individual at a time or with families and communities,” says Kim Dupree Jones 89MN, PhD, RN, FNP, FAAN, a fibromyalgia and nociplastic pain researcher and the senior associate dean for academic advancement and innovation at the School of Nursing.

“We do this work because we’re trying to change the course of human health, whether we’re doing that one individual at a time or with families and communities,” says Kim Dupree Jones 89MN, PhD, RN, FNP, FAAN, a fibromyalgia and nociplastic pain researcher and the senior associate dean for academic advancement and innovation at the School of Nursing.

‘So What’ Research

For Drenna Waldrop, PhD, the school’s associate dean for research, impact serves as the primary filter when junior faculty approach her with a research idea. When they share their question, she responds with a simple prompt: “So what?”

The question isn’t contrarian; it’s foundational, ensuring that real-world impact is considered from the very beginning of the research process.

“I ask, ‘How does (the research) matter? How will it help the community, the partner, or whoever you’re working with?'” Waldrop says.

For 11 consecutive years, the school has ranked in the top five for National Institutes of Health funding, receiving nearly $16.9 million last year. Still, she emphasizes that the true measure of success isn’t the size or number of grants.

“Grants help us get there, but they aren’t an end in themselves,” she says. “What matters is being intentional about doing work that is meaningful and brings about change.”

“We do this work because we’re trying to change the course of human health, whether we’re doing that one individual at a time or with families and communities.” 

Patti Dykes, PhD, MA, RN, FAAN, FACMI, FIAHSI, Independence Foundation Chair in Nursing Research and executive director of the school’s Center for Data Science, has driven significant change in fall prevention.

Patient falls are a leading cause of death and disability, and hospitalization itself increases risk. About 3% of patients fall in the hospital. Nearly 30% of those who fall are injured, leading to longer stays and higher costs for hospitals and patients.

Some costs are harder to measure. “Even if patients don’t get physically hurt, it’s a traumatizing experience for them,” Dykes says. “It’s terrible for the patient, it’s terrible for the family, and it’s terrible for the nurse.”

Dykes understood the reality of falls but couldn’t find any clinical trials testing solutions, so she started one. This led to Fall TIPS (Tailoring Interventions for Patient Safety), a toolkit that allows care team members to tailor fall-prevention interventions and display them in the electronic health record and at the bedside for reference and patient engagement and education.

Falls declined 20% in the first clinical trial, and subsequent studies consistently showed reductions in both falls and injuries. Over five years, the program was associated with $22 million in savings. Fall TIPS is now used in over 500 hospitals.

Building on this success, Dykes is now expanding her work to skilled nursing facilities across the U.S.

Nurses as Scientists

Associate Professor Brittany Butts 16PhD, RN, FAHA, FAAN, and Assistant Professor Telisa Spikes 19PhD, PhD, RN, FAHA, were nurses before becoming investigators. For Butts, nursing school and two years as an ER nurse were invaluable additions to her doctoral studies, providing the clinical insight she wanted as a scientist. Spikes spent 10 years as a cardiac care nurse and unit director, where she saw too many young Black women with heart failure. She pursued a PhD to change that reality.

Both Spikes and Butts found in nursing the skills they needed to build their research impact.

“Nurses always have to multitask,” Butts says. “We have to be a ‘MacGyver,’ adjusting as we go along. So, I think that ability informs our approach to research — we make things work because people’s lives depend on it.

Butts and Spikes followed different paths from nursing to research, but they both study biological aging — specifically, how psychosocial stressors affect cellular aging and heart health.

Spikes’ current study examines whether socially derived stressors — such as racism, sexism, social isolation, life events, and occupational and financial strain — are linked to accelerated biological aging and early cardiovascular risk in early and midlife Black women. Her prior research found that childhood trauma predicted poorer vascular function in Black women, while Black men showed the opposite pattern.

Butts has discovered that chronic caregiving stress accelerates cellular aging. Her research shows that caregivers who report more stress have shorter telomeres, the “caps” protecting the ends of DNA. Shortened telomeres are recognized as biomarkers of cellular aging and increased cardiovascular disease risk.

For both researchers, understanding the “why” behind these conditions is necessary to finding appropriate, workable solutions.

“We really have to think critically about what types of interventions are going to be sustainable in the presence of difficult social stressors,” Spikes says. “We should not have 29 or young 30-something-year-olds dying of heart disease.”

Big Problems, Broad Perspectives

While the school has a robust group of nurse scientists, more than a third of the school’s research faculty — 28 out of 74 — are from non-nursing fields.

“We study best methods for delivery of nursing care, but we also have a broader lens,” says Waldrop, herself a psychologist and HIV/ AIDS researcher. “It’s very easy for interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary work to be done at our school because we have people literally next door.”

One of those neighbors is Sharon Sonenblum, PhD, ScM, ScB, a mechanical and biomechanical engineer and associate professor who studies pressure injuries.

Her latest project explores how thermal imaging can read subtle heat changes at the skin’s surface. Early findings suggest these signals can reveal pressure injuries before they are visible, especially in patients whose skin tone, age, or other factors might mask early cues.

“It’s very easy for interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary work to be done at our school because we have people literally next door.”

Sonenblum collaborates with computer scientists, radiologists, and biomedical engineers, as well as nurses who help ensure the technologies and protocols can be implemented successfully.

“The last thing we want is a great piece of equipment that’s never going to be practical to use,” she says.

Multiplying Impact

Our researchers also collaborate across Emory and within its Woodruff Health Sciences Center, which includes the schools of medicine, public health, and nursing, along with Emory Healthcare, Winship Cancer Institute, and various centers.

Associate Professor Jinbing Bai, PhD, MSN, RN, FAAN, works with Emory experts in radiology and imaging, neurology, psychology and biostatistics to determine how cancer treatments such as chemotherapy disturb gut and brain function so they can develop precise interventions that reduce treatment-related toxicity and help patients feel stronger. He focuses his work on children and young adults with cancer.

The team is developing and testing brain-informed interventions such as diet, exercise, behavioral coaching, and survivorship navigation, Bai says — approaches strengthened by the collaboration among Emory colleagues.

“People bring different perspectives to the same idea, which refines our ideas and insights,” Bai says.

Nonprofit and professional organizations, peer universities, and governmental partners also play a vital role in helping School of Nursing researchers find solutions to vexing health issues.

Associate Professor Jessica Wells 12PhD, RN, WHNP-BC, FAAN, works with community partners to address an emerging public health problem: an aging HIV population who survives the virus only to face preventable human papillomavirus (HPV)-related cancers.

People with HIV are at higher risk of acquiring HPV and developing cervical, anal and oropharyngeal cancers. But Wells found that their awareness of the risk and the primary prevention, HPV vaccination, was low for many reasons, including a gap in discussing cancer screening and prevention in HIV settings.

To close the gap, Wells partners with community-based HIV clinics in metro Atlanta and Albany, Ga., to bring HPV vaccination awareness directly into the settings where HIV patients receive care and feel most comfortable — their HIV clinics.

She trains HIV clinic staff and clinicians to explain HPV risks and offer a high-quality recommendation for the HPV vaccine. Preliminary findings are promising, with participating clinics incorporating HPV vaccination into their services.

To Wells, the community partnership is key to the project’s early success. “It’s important to understand the lived experience of people where they are,” she says. “We couldn’t do this work without them.”

What’s Next

Waldrop is proud of the school’s strong research portfolio, but she recognizes that there is no time for pause. Health care is evolving at a breakneck pace, as are AI and other technological forces.

The school is well-positioned to meet the moment, she adds. More than a decade ago, the school invested in the Center for Data Science, which supports the use of big data to address health care challenges. Initiatives include mentorship, professional development, and support for the AI-focused PhD track and the upcoming master’s program in health care analytics.

“We have in-house expertise to inform any research that has a big data or AI technology component,” Waldrop says. “That puts us at the cutting edge of research.”

To help faculty collaborate on emerging research priorities, the school organizes its research enterprise into a variety of signature areas: aging studies and caregiving; AI and data science; cardiovascular, brain and biomarkers; natural disaster and environmental science; oncology; pediatrics; violence and injury prevention and treatment; and women’s health.

“We have in-house expertise to inform any research that has a big data or AI technology component. “That puts us at the cutting edge of research.”

The school also scans for opportunities that strengthen interprofessionalism and center individuals and communities in need, understanding that the future of health care depends on collaborative solutions that help everyone.

Measuring Impact: The Challenge and the Promise

Impact is essential to health research, but it is sometimes difficult to measure, Jones acknowledges. “It’s often like being an organizational champion. You know it when you see it.”

Real influence rarely happens quickly or arrives neatly wrapped at the end of a grant cycle. Instead, it happens incrementally through awareness, behavior change, and improved quality of life.

“You start where you can,” Waldrop says. “You keep reaching out, partnering, following populations, and sharing your findings. And then you get feedback, make adjustments, and learn how it’s changing patients’ lives.”

Melanie Kieve is senior director of communications and marketing and editor of Emory Nursing.

Some of the research in this article was supported by federal funding. For more information, please visit nursing.emory.edu/research/disclosures.