McFarlin named 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient
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UIC Nursing professor emerita and three-time alumna Barbara McFarlin, PhD ’05, MS ’84, BSN ’74, CNM, RDMS, FACNM, FAAN, was named the UIC College of Nursing’s 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient. This is the 46th year the college has conferred this award, the college’s highest alumni honor.
McFarlin will be honored at the UIC Nursing PhD Reunion on Oct. 26.
McFarlin’s achievement-studded career includes 35 years as a nurse-midwife, delivering more than 4,000 babies in Illinois, Michigan and West Virginia, and 17 years on the faculty at UIC Nursing, where she served as head of what is now the Department of Human Development Nursing Science. She is also a veteran of the U.S. Navy.
As a researcher, McFarlin has conducted groundbreaking work on identifying a pregnant person’s risk for premature births with her longtime collaborator, Bill O’Brien, a UIUC professor of electrical and computer engineering. A January 2024 paper published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology Maternal Fetal Medicine established that their method of using quantitative ultrasound works as early as 23 weeks into pregnancy to predict a person’s risk for delivering prematurely.