Jacqueline McGrath, PhD, RN, FNAP, FAAN

Dr. Jacqueline McGrath is a Professor and Vice Dean for Faculty Excellence at the UTH San Antonio, School of Nursing. She recently joined our faculty from the University of Connecticut, School of Nursing where she was a Professor from 2012-2018. She also served as the Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship, the Director of the Center for Nursing Scholarship as well as the Director of the Ph.D. Program. Through a partnership with Connecticut Children’s Medical Center (Hartford, CT), she was also the Director for Nursing Research. Through collaborative leadership with nursing staff, she established Connecticut Children’s Institute for Research and Evidence-Based Practice. 

Research foci include integration of family-centered and developmentally supportive caregiving with premature infants and their families in the NICU. More specifically, her work has focused on the biobehavioral outcomes of increasing parent engagement on both parents and the infant. Increasing parent engagement is believed to be a mechanism for increasing parent self-management skills after infant discharge and ultimately enhancing infant long-term development. She has also conducted studies related to preterm infants’ oral feeding readiness and preterm infant touch and massage (parent provided). Based on her research, she developed the NICU-PLAY program for parents and their hospitalized preterm infants. She has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles in both research and practice journals. Since 2014, Dr. McGrath has held the position Co-Editor for Advances in Neonatal Care the journal of the National Association of Neonatal Nurses. 

In 2007, Dr. McGrath became a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing. She received her BSN from the University of Akron; MSN from Kent State University in parent-child nursing; both a post-master’s certificate as a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. McGrath is an excellent mentor and teacher; she believes true leadership is seeing the brilliance in other people.

Relevant Diseases: 

Prematurity, Preterm infant growth and development, Developmental delays, Early life stress, Preterm infant pain

Specific Field of Study: 

Parent engagement with high-risk vulnerable infants in the neonatal intensive care unit. Supporting parents to gain self-management strategies to best care for their vulnerable infants.

Research Techniques: 

Salivary cortisol, oxytocin, gut microbiome, pen and paper instruments, video and audio tapes of sessions