By Christina Frank
As the daughter of a career Army officer, it made perfect sense to Laura Manzo, BSN, PhD, to combine her love of nursing with a commitment to military service.
Manzo joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) while pursuing her BSN in nursing at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu and served in the Army for four years after she graduated. Those four years turned into what has now been a 16-year career in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps — one that has taken her across the globe, with deployments to Afghanistan and Guyana and assignments in Texas, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Wisconsin.
In 2022, Manzo decided to pursue her interest in research and enrolled in the PhD program at Yale School of Nursing. It was fully funded by the military, with the stipulation being that she had to complete her doctoral studies in three years, as opposed to the typical four or five. “The faculty was beyond amazing,” says Laura. “They were so incredibly supportive of my timeline.”
Trained as a critical care nurse, Manzo worked as a nurse manager in the neonatal ICU at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and as the practice manager for a primary care clinic at the Army War College. “The Army has a lot of great opportunities,” she says. “As a nurse, I’ve been able to hold positions I never would have imagined.”
Her dissertation focused on a critical but under-researched area: the association between perinatal mental health conditions and adverse pregnancy outcomes among active-duty servicewomen. “What we found was that servicewomen with diagnosed mental health conditions had a significantly increased risk of preterm birth or preeclampsia,” she says. “That gives us insight into how we can adjust clinical practice to provide targeted care, especially because military women have a higher burden of mental illness than civilian women.”
Now, with her PhD in hand, she will transition to a new role as a nurse-scientist at the Fort Liberty Research Institute in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. There she’ll be doing human subjects research within the military healthcare system. “I’ve always been interested in research,” Manzo says. “This is just the beginning.”