Bonnie Breitmayer
Associate Professor
Department of Population Health Nursing Science
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About
Professor Breitmayer holds degrees in nursing and in developmental psychology and currently teaches a pre-nursing course in human development. Early in her nursing career she cared for children hospitalized for serious mental disorders. Curiosity about what may have led to the children’s difficulties and what might be done to prevent their development in other children led her to study human development at Cornell University. After earning her PhD she held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina. Her research at UNC focused on children who were enrolled from birth to kindergarten in the ABCEDARIAN program due to being born to a family of low socioeconomic status The ABCEDARIAN research program was designed to study the effectiveness of early intervention in preventing mental retardation. She was so happy to hear on NPR recently an interview with a man who was one of the "at risk" children whose development she studied. Now, as an adult, that man is a successful businessman!
While a faculty member at the University of Illinois, she has studied other populations known to be “at risk”, most prominently children with chronic illnesses. She is especially interested in “resilience”, which is a normal development of persons who are at risk for some sort of problem, and in what factors contribute to resilience. An advantage to learning about these factors is that it may be possible for health practitioners to incorporate some of them in interventions aimed at promoting health and preventing disease. In recent years her interest has expanded to the development of persons across the entire life span and on environments that will foster optimal development.