
Photo by Nastya-Dulhiier/Unsplash
For Jennifer Tourville, it started with babies. Before joining the College of Nursing, she worked as a pediatric nurse practitioner in her hometown of Sevierville, Tennessee. She made nursery rounds at LeConte Medical Center and saw babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). Their mothers had misused opioids during pregnancy, and Tourville worked amidst a double heartbreak: suffering babies and the mothers who loved them but often couldn’t care for them. Learn how Tourville joined more than a dozen faculty members throughout the university to form the Substance Misuse Community of Scholars, researchers that are working to better understand the impact of substance misuse on individuals.