In May 2020, CRECE and ECHO Researcher Emily Zimmerman was officially recommended for promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure. As Project 1 Co-Investigator and the Early Career Investigator for CRECE, this promotion is a major achievement and only one of her many accomplishments during her time with CRECE.
In 2018, Emily received a grant under ECHO for her project titled, “Integration of Non-Nutritive Suck and Eye Tracking as markers of Neurodevelopment across Five ECHO Cohorts,” to expand her research with the non-nutritive suck device, developed in her lab to quantitatively test suck patterns in infants. The ultimate goal of this study is to demonstrate that together NNS and infrared eye tracking measures can assess a broad range of neurofunctions in young infants and that these approaches are sensitive measures of environmental exposures.
In addition to this, she also an R21 under the Zika in Infants in Pregnancy (ZIP) study, titled “Examining Feeding and Cardio-respiratory Patterning in Zika-Exposed Infants in Puerto Rico” and another R21 “Examining the Interplay of Sucking, Feeding, and Vocal Development in the First Year of Life.”
Last year, she was awarded the 2019 Bouvé Kenerson Faculty Award for her contributions to the health sciences field at Northeastern University through her research with ECHO and CRECE. This award is given to a faculty member who has shown a commitment to improving the health of people in the urban community through interdisciplinary research and teaching activities.
The CRECE team is proud of her many accomplishments during her time with CRECE, and wants to congratulate Emily for this milestone in her career.