Mary Woo, professor at the School of Nursing, has been selected to give the third National Institute of Nursing Research Director’s Lecture.
The NINR Director’s Lecture is an annual event, designed to bring the nation’s top nurse scientists to the NIH campus to share their work and interests with a transdisciplinary audience.
Woo is an internationally recognized researcher. Her initial groundbreaking research focused on the brain-heart interactions in relation to sudden death risk, particularly in advanced heart failure patients. She was the first investigator to report specific sites of gray-matter loss (parts of the brain damaged/missing) in heart failure patients and that this gray matter loss/brain structure damage is impacted by the amount of sleep-disordered breathing and gender.
Woo has several studies currently funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research/National Institutes of Health, including examining the relationship between sleep and brain structure in heart failure. She's also working on determining if there is a relationship between short-term memory, thiamine levels (vitamin B1), and brain structure in heart failure.
