USF’s Distinguished University Professor of 2021
weeks. Groer remembers the teams of nurses tending to her, their level of care that helped lead to her recovery. “They had an enormous influence on me,” she recalled.
Y
ears before founding a cutting-edge research laboratory at the USF College of Nursing, decades before her pioneering work on mother-infant microbiomes, Dr. Maureen Groer was a young girl with polio, surrounded by nurses who would help shape the rest of her life. Groer—USF’s Distinguished University Professor of 2021— would go on to accomplish global recognition for her biobehavioral research. She would gain renown for extensive collaborations and her legendary mentoring. But that would all come later. Long before she was a pediatric nurse and researcher, Groer was a patient. Born and raised in Lexington, Massachusetts, near Boston, Groer was drawn to science and biology from an early age, thanks to her father – a vice president and electrical engineer at Raytheon Technologies. He would help her with science fair projects for which she won awards at the school and state levels. But it was the summer before fourth grade that would also leave a deep impression. While at summer camp, she contracted polio. This was just the year before the polio vaccine was available, and she was hospitalized and bed-ridden for
When it was time for college, Groer intended to pursue medical school—an unusual path for a young woman in the 1960s—an era when the thinking was that “girls went to college mostly to catch a man,” she said laughing. With her parents focusing on her brother’s four-year university plans, she chose nursing school – studying for three years and then working several years as a pediatric nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital, her selected field inspired by her own childhood experiences. As she was working at the hospital, her young patients’ conditions fired her interest in biology and pathology. She was determined to go to medical school, paying her own way working as a nurse. But while studying for a master’s degree in radiation biology at Boston University, her plans were diverted again. In graduate school she met the man who would become her husband and life partner, a theoretical physicist whose career trajectory soon moved them to Illinois. Instead of medical school, her resumed studies at the University of Illinois delved her deeper into academic research, culminating in a doctorate degree in physiology and biophysics. That path also cemented her true passion, one that had been brewing since graduate school. FALL 2021 | 47
