Hannah Kumarasamy, PhD(c), CNM, WHNP-BC, MPH, is the 2026-2027 recipient of the Allison Adams Wieczorek Scholarship from Nurses Educational Funds (NEF). She completed a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Lakeview College of Nursing in Charleston, Illinois in 2010, a Master of Public Health from Indiana University Bloomington in Bloomington, Indiana, in 2012, a Master of Science in Nursing as a Nurse-Midwife and Women’s Health/Gender-related Nurse Practitioner from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2018, and is currently a PhD candidate completing a Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing from The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in Birmingham, Alabama. She will defend her dissertation in the Fall of 2026 and graduate in December 2026.

Hannah was first inspired to pursue nursing as a high school student living in a rural, medically underserved community where the closest hospital was forty minutes away. Over the last 16 years, Hannah has worked in remote, rural, and urban settings, domestically and globally, to address maternal health outcomes through clinical and public health programming. Most recently, as a practicing nurse-midwife at a safety-net hospital in the Deep South, she began to question the cost of the pregnancy to the pregnant person and why we don’t talk about this. This led to her pursuit of research-oriented doctoral training at a renowned research institution, situated in the Deep South. Deep South states are disproportionately and inequitably impacted by both maternal morbidity and mortality. To begin to address these outcomes and better understand the unexplored costs that may be contributing, Hannah sought mentorship from experts in multiple disciplines to inform her novel mixed-methods research study on pregnancy burden.

Throughout her doctorate, she has worked with the Maternal Mortality Review Committee of the Georgia Department of Public Health on the Emory University IMPACT Study at Grady Memorial Hospital, and practiced clinically. The culmination of her professional experience has led to her deep understanding of the realities individuals face during pregnancy and the layer effect of the pregnancy experience. During her time at UAB, she was selected as a 2025-2026 Health Services Research T32 pre-doctoral trainee, the doctoral recipient of the Samuel B. Barker Award in Graduate Studies, and received the 2026 Nightingale Scholarship and the 2026 March of Dimes Nursing Scholarship.

Her doctoral research study will result in a validated pregnancy burden definition and model. This will pave the way for further exploration during post-doctoral training and tool development for clinical and research measurement. Receiving the Allison Adams Wieczorek Scholarship is an honor, further validating the pursuit of this research trajectory and the reality of what pregnant individuals experience that is frequently overlooked. This funding will support Hannah to continue the forward trajectory of her research.