Description of the video:

My name is Heather Hardin, and I'm an assistant professor at the Indiana University School of Nursing. So, my interest in research started when I was a young person. My mom is a nurse, and when I was a teenager, my friends started saying things to me like, "Can you ask your mom a question for me?" And they were looking for someplace, someone who could provide them with honest, non-judgmental, you know, science-based, true answers, right? They wanted answers they could trust. So, while I was in my PhD program, I wanted to get some more clinical experience working with young people. And so I looked around my community, and the only place that I could find that young people were routinely receiving health care at for prevention was at WIC, which is Women, Infants, and Children. I ended up being the nurse who saw all the teen moms every week in my local community. They had needs for mental health care. They had needs for transportation to healthcare. They had needs around finding a healthcare provider that they can trust. I think that all of these experiences have sort of come together to influence the work that I'm doing now. So, my research focuses on behavior change interventions to improve mental health in youth. I did a trial where I developed an intervention to address depressive symptoms in youth who were diagnosed with depression. Teens in the study told me that they really loved being a part of the study. They really liked the intervention. They thought it helped them a lot. However, they wished they'd had it a few years earlier to prevent the disease from progressing and to avoid, you know, all that discomfort. I took their advice, and now I'm trying out this intervention with youth who are 11 to 13 years old, who do not yet have depression. And, our goal is to see if we can prevent or delay the onset of depression in these youth. The nurse's contribution to research that is unique is that we sort of take a whole person perspective, and we focus on things like symptom management and self-management of chronic diseases. And so, nurses are able to help people learn how to manage their own conditions so that they do not get worse. Or in my case, I'm hoping to prevent the onset or delay the onset of a chronic disease. The reason why someone might want to come to the Indiana University School of Nursing to do research or get their PhD is that there's a wealth of research support available. The faculty and the researchers here, they're very supportive, and they're very collaborative, and they're really good about helping one another make their research better, to make it more applicable, and to help connect other researchers to resources to increase the reach of their research.