Jane Harney, PhD, RN, NNP-BC

My research examines the relationships between environmental stress, genomics, and epigenomics. Stemming from 20+ years of clinical experience in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, my program of research focuses on understanding and attenuating the intergenerational inheritance of environmental stress and its impact on neonatal physiology and outcomes. I am especially interested in understanding how the stress of structural racism, individual discrimination, and other social inequities contribute to neonatal health disparities.

Research Focus Areas

Children, Families and Reproductive Health

• Neonatal physiology and long-term outcomes.
• Influence of parental stress exposure on infant physiology, response to treatment, and outcomes.

Symptom Science and Palliative Care

• Influence of environmental stress exposure on epigenetics and associated gene expression and physiological pathways.
• Understanding how genomic variability may influence an individual’s response to environmental stress exposure.

Health Disparities

• Examine how structural racism/individual discrimination stress contributes to neonatal health disparities.
• Understanding the relationships between structural racism/individual discrimination and maternal and paternal genomics and epigenomics.
• Examining the potential inheritance of parental epigenetic changes associated with environmental stress exposure and its contribution to neonatal health disparities.

Children, Families & Reproductive Health Symptom Science and Palliative Care Health Disparities