A leading neonate and infant pain researcher, Assistant Professor Mariana Bueno has been awarded the 2026 Dorothy M. Pringle Award for Research Excellence from the Sigma Theta Tau International, Lambda-Pi-At-Large Chapter.
Bueno was recognized during an awards ceremony held at the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing on May 19.
“It was truly humbling to be nominated for and receive this award,” says Bueno. “This recognition highlights not only the importance of this field of research in nursing, but its potential to improve care and health outcomes for babies and their families, and to support high-quality nursing practice in NICUs worldwide.”
The award, established by Dot Pringle, a former dean of Bloomberg Nursing, recognizes the significant impact of nursing led research on nursing practice and health care policy. For Bueno, the award acknowledges her outstanding impact on the field of pain management in infants and neonates and the implications this research has on nurses and health professionals working in NICUs and with infants more broadly across health systems worldwide.
Bueno, who is also a Pain Scientist at the University of Toronto Centre for the Study of Pain, recently published a Cochrane Systematic Review, a culmination of her research on sucrose use for pain management in infants. Her focused research found that sucrose analgesia is an effective way to manage pain in NICU babies during routine venipuncture. She received extensive coverage on this significant research showing the impact her work is having on nursing practice and policy.
Bueno notes that procedural pain for infants is poorly managed in low, middle and high-income countries, and that repeated exposure to untreated acute pain at early stages in life may lead to short and long-term changes in how the brain processes and perceives external stimuli.
This Summer, she will present on parental involvement with neonatal pain management and her new research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), which is focused on health equity and pain care in low-resourced contexts – at the Sigma Theta Tau International Nursing Research Congress.