Background
Dr. Eileen Condon Ph.D., APRN, FNP-BC is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing. Her interests are in promoting health and health equity among children and families who are socially and economically marginalized. Before her career as a researcher, Condon worked as a registered nurse and a family nurse practitioner in a community health center.
At her first job working as a registered nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit, Condon witnessed how powerful a maternal/child relationship and how protective this can be for infants and their families. This sparked her interest in learning more about the intergenerational transmission of adversity and protective factors and its effect on family and child health. However, it wasn’t until she received her master’s degree and became a family nurse practitioner that she realized the extent of social and environmental stressors that unfairly affect marginalized families. These clinical experiences motivated Condon to pursue her PhD in nursing and study how stress and adversity affect families’ physical and mental health.
Condon is the principal investigator of a research study focused on understanding the intergenerational transmission of stress and protective factors, and particularly the role of sleep and circadian rhythms. This study is funded by the National Institutes of Health and involves caregivers with preschool-aged children. She and her team use devices to measure sleep and rest-activity patterns in these caregiver-child pairs. Condon’s goal is to understand how the stress or adversity that a parent experiences affects their own sleep and circadian rhythms and how that in turn affects their child. “[I’m]…very passionate about social determinants of health and how stress and adversity are really having an effect on the health of the families,” Condon says.
Involvement with CSCH
Condon recently joined CSCH as an affiliate and is working on making connections with other researchers who are interested in promoting health equity for marginalized families. She believes that stressors like childhood adversity and socioeconomic disadvantage need to be addressed on family, community, and policy levels. “The goal is to do this work so that it can benefit people…a lot of times that involves making policy changes,” says Condon.
The best way to learn more about Condon’s lab work is by viewing Condon’s Lab webpage.
Fun Facts
Condon is a big fan of college basketball and always enjoys going to watch the games. She also has a rescue dog named Rosie who loves to attend her online meetings.
Undergraduate Researcher Jannell Brown interviewed Dr. Condon and wrote this profile.