“People don’t often discover the course until they are older,” she says. “I had no idea what nursing research was like, but I wanted to dip my toes in it. I really discovered I liked working with kids and I learned how to better communicate with them.”

Vilda was part of a group that used data analysis to determine whether asthma education helps elementary-aged children better manage their health. Their findings were presented during Binghamton Research Days. She completed training in working with human subjects, became a facilitator through the American Lung Association’s Open Airways for Schools program, and then went to a local elementary school and taught children with asthma how to detect the warning signs of asthma, avoid their triggers and make decisions about their health.

That research experience, along with a three-month student nursing externship in the pediatric intensive care unit at NYU Langone Medical Center, helped influence her career aspirations: Vilda hopes to work in a pediatric emergency department after graduation.

“I just really love that population and the diversity of cases you see. You have to think on your feet and really use your critical thinking skills,” she says. “And I love treating the person rather than the idea that you’re treating a patient with a medical diagnosis. It’s why I chose the profession in the first place. You’re treating the mind, body and spirit, and I try to focus on that every time I have a patient interaction.”

The New Windsor resident knew nursing was her calling by the time she was in high school.

Binghamton University was the first school out of the 30 that she visited. “It was the gold standard for all of the other visits going forward,” she says. “I fell in love with the campus and the welcome I got from the nursing program advisors. Without a doubt, I know I made the right decision. It’s one of the best in the state and as a New York resident, it’s a great value.”

When Vilda graduates from the Decker School of Nursing this spring, she will also leave behind a legacy of mentorship, professional development and networking that will help future students pursue healthcare careers.

The Nursing Student Association, like so many organizations on campus, had to limit traditional social gatherings this school year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Vilda saw it as an opportunity to encourage her peers to develop relationships with older classmates and alumni so they might feel better prepared applying for externships or future jobs.

As the outgoing president of the NSA, Vilda oversaw the creation of a professional development chair position. She also designed a series of networking and mentoring events, including a collaboration with the Fleishman Center for Career and Professional Development for nursing-specific workshops on resume-writing and LinkedIn. There was also a summer job/externship event where seniors shared their experiences with younger students and an alumni week that featured a virtual panel discussion.

“Alyssa takes pride in serving as a role model to current and future nursing students, and her leadership is valued and respected,” says Sara Wozniak, senior assistant dean for the Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences. “She is passionate, outgoing, reliable and has an amazing ability to bring people together.”

Lynn Baniak crosses her arms when she gets anxious. What does she have to be anxious about?

She is a nurse in a building full of engineers. She is studying a treatment for a common yet poorly understood musculoskeletal disorder. She is years away from the oncology nursing she’s familiar with and the doctorate that will label her an expert.

Nothing to be anxious about.

“I don’t follow the herd. It makes you kind of fearless,” she says. “And I don’t like failing.”

The treatment she researches has too much potential for her to accept failure. It would help 12 million Americans with fibromyalgia enjoy a better quality of life.

No pressure.

Fibromyalgia, which causes widespread pain and tenderness, has been linked to depression, stiffness and a host of fatigue-related symptoms either caused by or in conjunction with poor sleep.

Working with data and theories developed by her Binghamton University advisors — Carolyn Pierce, an associate professor of nursing, and Kenneth McLeod, a professor of bioengineering — Baniak began testing an observation: that stimulating a nerve cluster around the balls of the feet provokes the soleus muscle in the calf to greater activity.

The soleus pumps body fluids from the legs back toward the heart. Poor circulation is linked to poor sleep in patients with disorders ranging from fibromyalgia to congestive heart failure.

Baniak recruited hundreds of people in 2011 and 2012 and began tests on 31 of them with a device that stimulates the Meissner’s corpuscles by vibrating the feet back and forth 45 times a second for an hour each day. Ten finished the trial.

The result? It works. Patients went from an average score of 53 on the FIQR scale — a measure of a fibromyalgia patient’s quality of life — to 33 in just 12 weeks. A typical nonfibromyalgia score would be below 10.

Next Baniak must explain why it works. Why does it improve sleep? Does improved sleep in itself reduce pain? Or does it improve the ability to cope with the same pain?

Pierce says Baniak’s work requires a flexibility of interest, unlike colleagues who base their research on prior nursing experience, like the oncology that filled Baniak’s career at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. “Lynn was very open to doing the hands-on clinical research with engineers,” Pierce says. “She was particularly able to see what the applications were.”

And to what can this treatment be applied? Fibromyalgia, sure, but how about congestive heart failure? Edema? Sleep apnea? That will come later. Baniak is already considering post-doctoral research.

The possibilities leave Baniak a little anxious: “It’s almost a test to me,” she says. You can’t be productive or successful if you can’t face your fear.”

“Dealing with PTSD is like riding a rollercoaster, ” said Muscari, an associate professor in the Decker School of Nursing at Binghamton University. “The swing of emotions can have a huge impact on relationships, work environment and social activities. And in addition to disrupting the lives of the victims, PTSD often has a ripple effect, throwing relationships with family members, friends and colleagues into complete turmoil. But help is out there, and this book offers individuals with PTSD and their families the tools to recognize the problem and know how and where to get assistance.”

Muscari said the key is to get treatment as soon as possible after PTSD symptoms develop so that it doesn’t become a long-term condition.

“Treatments for PTSD can involve psychotherapy or medications, or a combination of both,” Muscari said. “It’s all about support, dialogue and education. But because everyone is different, there is no substitute for treatment provided by a mental health professional experienced in treating PTSD — someone who is trained to figure out what’s going to work best. And while my book cannot replace therapy, it can be a valuable resource for sufferers and family.”

In addition to covering current treatment options, What Nurses Know….PTSD goes to the root of the condition, examining the causes and the disorder’s impact on victims and their families. It also looks at associated problems such as substance abuse and offers tips for managing stress. For instance, Muscari urges PTSD sufferers to use time-management techniques such as learning how to say “no” and delegation as ways to manage everyday stresses.

Muscari also examines PTSD in children and adolescents, focusing on what makes this disorder so challenging in young sufferers. “Kids with PTSD may experience many of the same symptoms as adults,” Muscari said. “But they often have greater difficulty talking about their thoughts and feelings. Children and teens also tend to have different types of recollection experiences than adults. We’re talking frightening dreams and even behavioral problems. If not treated properly, a child’s sense of security can be severely impacted, which in turn influences brain function and development.”

Muscari said the goal of What Nurses Know….PTSD is to show victims and their friends and families that they are not alone in their struggle.

“PTSD sufferers have a real illness, one that is as real as high blood pressure or diabetes,” Muscari said. “But it can also be seen as merely a barrier in our life’s journey.”

That message came through loud and clear when Binghamton researchers went into the field to learn how to deliver information about tobacco use to pregnant women. Based on insights from front-line experts — pregnant smokers and their healthcare providers — the investigators created a video that they hope will succeed where other interventions have failed.

Twenty-six percent of women in upstate New York who gave birth in 2009 smoked during the three months before they conceived, and 12.24 percent still smoked in the last three months of their pregnancies, according to the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In some rural areas the problem is worse, says Geraldine Britton, assistant professor at the Decker School of Nursing and director of Binghamton’s Interdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Program (ITURP). In western Steuben County, for example, 52 percent of women enrolled in Medicaid, Obstetrics and Maternal Services (MOMS) in 2009 said they smoked during the three months before they became pregnant.

Even that figure may not be telling the whole story. “Rates of smoking during pregnancy are profoundly under-reported,” Britton says.

Britton’s interest in smoking during pregnancy dates back to the 1980s, when she worked as a clinical nurse specialist and educator in maternal child care, and to the 1990s, when she coordinated the Southern Tier Tobacco Awareness Coalition.

Later, for her doctoral dissertation at the Decker School, she tested the effectiveness of a nurse-managed program called Smoke Free Baby and Me that was integrated into routine prenatal care. She and a coalition of providers followed 194 pregnant smokers through pregnancy and postpartum. Compared to a control group, the study found significant differences in smoking cessation at the postpartum visit in the group of women enrolled in the program who had quit just before their first prenatal visit — helping them not relapse. But it found no differences among those who were still smoking at the first prenatal visit.

In addition, the study revealed that many expectant mothers were hiding their smoking from healthcare providers. The women’s self-reports were validated by testing for a metabolite of nicotine called cotinine, which is found in smokers’ urine. “We found that 30 to 40 percent of the women who told us that they weren’t smoking had positive cotinines,” Britton says.

Hoping to devise better smoking-cessation strategies, Britton and her colleagues in ITURP, supported by a March of Dimes grant, conducted a series of nine focus groups. Three of those groups consisted of pregnant smokers and six of healthcare providers. “The purpose was to increase the understanding of the pregnant smoker, including the motivation to quit,” Britton says. The researchers also asked for ideas about how to communicate the message.

One important insight that emerged from the groups is that it’s hard to appreciate a risk you can’t see. Unlike a baby born with fetal alcohol syndrome, the child born to a smoker may look like any other newborn. But a mother’s smoking can create a host of hazards for the baby, including low birth weight, nicotine withdrawal, asthma, cognitive delays and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “We had to somehow put a face to the problem,” Britton says.

The idea of a video appealed to both the groups of expectant mothers and to the healthcare professionals. One nurse, for example, mentioned that New York state requires all new parents to watch a video on shaken baby syndrome before leaving the hospital, says Pamela Manktelow, coordinator of the MOMS program at Saint James Mercy Hospital in Hornell, N.Y. “She said, ‘If we had a smoking video for pregnant women, so they would know what they’re doing to their baby as they watch it, I think that would help.’”

A video also allows you to control the tone of the message — an urgent concern that emerged from the focus groups. “The pregnant women have an absolute cynicism, or even fear, about being lectured,” says ITURP co-investigator Sean McKitrick, former assistant provost and director of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment at Binghamton University.

Having analyzed the themes from the focus groups, ITURP contracted with White Knight Productions of Vestal, N.Y., to shoot the video. The researchers then returned to groups of pregnant women and nurses for ideas about content. To provide maximum impact, focus-group participants decided that the video should feature real people, not actors. For example, in one vignette, a woman who smoked during her pregnancy describes how she and her family resuscitated her weeks-old infant, who had stopped breathing — and then cautions pregnant women against smoking. “Her little girl is 4 years old and has severe asthma now,” Britton says.

Recruiting women to participate was easy, Manktelow says. “The women feel that they’re helping other people quit.” Even when the crew filmed a newborn howling his way through nicotine withdrawal, the mother didn’t hesitate to let ITURP use the footage, she says.

Along with mothers from participating hospitals and clinics, Manktelow and several other nurses, including Lucy Keith from Arnot Ogden Medical Center’s MOMS, appear in the video. The producers also used children to talk about the dangers of smoking. “The pregnant women felt that this message was probably better delivered by children,” Britton says.

With production complete, members of ITURP are seeking funds to help them test the video. They plan to show the segment, which runs about 10 minutes, to pregnant women during their prenatal visits. Researchers will measure whether women who see the video, compared with a control group, are more likely to quit or cut down on cigarettes and less likely to resume smoking.

Besides producing a new smoking-cessation intervention, the project has helped to solidify ITURP’s partnership with community healthcare providers. Such alliances are crucial for developing effective solutions based on real-world evidence, Britton says. “I like to call it the ‘triple helix’ — practice, research and theory,” she explains. “You need to start in practice in order to develop questions, design effective interventions and conduct research to test and build theory. Then you must return the findings to practice.”