UA Professor Receives Honor for Research on Massage Therapy

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Dr. Maria Hernandez-Reif, professor of human development and family studies and director of the Pediatric Development Research Lab at The University of Alabama’s College of Human Environmental Sciences, has received the Ashley Montagu Award from the Canadian Touch Research Center.

The center gives the Ashley Montagu Award biennially to “a distinguished world personality who brilliantly excels at his or her work and whose devotion leads to the advancement of touch in the world.”

Hernandez-Reif earned her doctorate from Florida International University in psychology (life-span development) with a focus on infant cognition. She then joined the faculty in the department of pediatrics at the University of Miami, where she gained an international reputation for her collaborative research with Dr. Tiffany Field on massage therapy effects for enhancing the development of infants, children and adolescents.

Her current research interests include studying the effects of maternal depression on children’s development, examining early indicators in infancy that predict preschool-age children’s cognitive development and massage therapy effects for helping infants sleep.

She founded the Pediatric Development Research Lab at UA in 2007. More information on her research can be found at http://www6.miami.edu/touch-research/.