By Tucker Carden
University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing PhD student Hannah Kumarasamy, MSN, MPH, CNM, WHNP-BC, is the 2026-2027 recipient of the Allison Adams Wieczorek Scholarship from Nurses Educational Funds, which supports standout graduate nurses pursuing advanced study in maternal-infant and pediatric nursing. NEF is a national non-profit that aims to promote leadership through scholarship support for professional nurses seeking advanced degrees in nursing education, practice, research, administration and health policy.
"This speaks to the education and rigorous training that you get at UAB,” Kumaramsamy said of receiving the scholarship. She went on to specifically mention and credit her improvement in writing while at UAB. “Over the years, my writing has gotten better. I can express what I’m trying to do in research in a different way. That just shows the foundation that UAB brings in helping people to obtain their next step.”
Kumarasamy’s scholarly project, “Understanding Pregnancy Burden: An Explanatory Sequential Mixed Methods Study of Pregnant and Postpartum Individuals in the Deep South,” examines and defines pregnancy burden, investigates its contributing factors and studies its characteristics with the goal of being able to measure it through an operational definition and effectively treat it.
“In the Deep South we have worse maternal health outcomes than in the rest of the country,” Kumarasamy said. “And we need to normalize the hard parts of pregnancy, so people don’t feel alone in what they’re feeling.”
A certified nurse-midwife, Kumarasamy hopes “that we can start to intervene and address pregnancy-related stress in a different way than the clinical setting is currently doing.”
During her time at UAB, Kumarasamy has been selected as a 2025-2026 Health Services Research T32 pre-doctoral trainee, chosen as the doctoral recipient of the Samuel B. Barker Award in Graduate Studies, received the 2026 Nightingale Award for Scholarly Work and received a 2026 March of Dimes Nursing Scholarship.
Kumarasamy successfully defended her dissertation in September and plans to graduate in December.