And it's been a bit of a convoluted, maybe not the traditional, if there is any such thing as a traditional career path. I am a registered nurse. I got a Master's Degree as a pediatric nurse practitioner. And then got my first teaching job teaching in the neonatal intensive care unit where I had never practiced before.

So when I entered my doctoral program, which was in child and family studies. It was not in nursing, because at that time back in the '80s there weren't that many nursing doctoral programs, and I was at the University of Tennessee and didn't want to move with having young children and so forth. So my dissertation ended up being a study of how nurses can help parents with pre-term babies in the neonatal intensive care unit. Prepare for parenting, these very fragile babies.

Subsequently I got very enmeshed and involved in neonatal intensive care work, having students in the neonatal unit, and my first NIH grant was actually a grant to look at how parents touch their babies when they visit the nursery.

Pretty successful career path, but then I hit a brick wall, and I couldn't, two or three grants kept going in and not getting funded. And you can't do this kind of research without money.

So as often happens when one door closes, others open. I was, all these years I had been doing a lot of volunteer work in Guatemala with a group called Alabama Guatemala Partners. So I was keeping my Spanish fluent, but not doing any research really with Latino populations. But in 2003 I received a Fulbright Grant and spent a six-month sabbatical in Chile.

And when I came back to the states and realized, well this premature baby research isn't going anywhere for me, and there is a growing Latino population in Alabama where I live. And so that led me to this wonderful mid-career trajectory change. I was able to get some pilot study money from the Southern Agromedicine Institute because of the connection I had with my Guatemala work, really.

And from there I've been working in a rural community in Alabama with Latino immigrant families doing focus groups, identifying what the community sees as the need for promoting, helping parents and developing Latino partnership in that county.

And so now where I am today is trying to identify adaptations for an intervention that's been successfully used for many years with English-speaking families in the U.S., the Strengthening Families Program, for parents with kids from 10-14. It's also been translated into Spanish and used in Latin America. But I'm interested in perhaps adapting it for immigrant families in the U.S., so that's where I am today.

Very different from the neonatal intensive care unit, but it's been a fun journey, and I encourage, I guess what I encourage people to do is when doors close, to look at that as opportunities and look around and see where can you walk through next?