Linda S. Beeber, PhD., PMHCNS-BC, FAAN

Assistant Dean and Distinguished Term Professor

School of Nursing

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

E-mail: beeber@email.unc.edu

Research Interests and Goals:

Linda Beeber is an advanced practice psychiatric mental health nurse (Board-certified Clinical Nurse Specialist by the American Nurses Credentialing Center) who has practiced for more than 40 years and conducted funded mental health research for more than 20 years. Funded through NIH/NIMH/NICHD, DHHS (ACF/ACYF/HRSA) and private foundations, her multidisciplinary collaborators and she have conducted community-based research that is focused on reducing maternal depressive symptoms and enhancing parenting in populations of high-risk mothers of infants and toddlers (0-3 years old). Beeber’s team contributed early data to document how mild to severe maternal depressive symptoms beyond the postpartum era could negatively impact the neurocognitive development in high-risk infants and toddlers from intrauterine life to three years of age. They also identified how context-specific stressors were linked to maternal depressive symptoms and compromised parenting in unserved high-risk populations (economically impoverished mothers; newly-immigrated mothers of Mexican descent; mothers with a child with congenital conditions or newly-identified developmental delays).

Dr. Beeber has worked with students and trainees in nursing, psychology, medicine, social work, allied health, and human development on clinical and academic endeavors. She has mentored the next generation of scientists to engage them in learning about highly-stressed parents who are raising children in the context of economic impoverishment, discrimination, fear, geographic isolation and limited prospects for the future. She is familiar with different scientific designs for building and testing interventions, with community partnership models of research that engage stakeholders, and with the art and discipline of gaining NIH support.