Maureen Hack has died.

Apparently she died earlier today. Although several years past a usual person’s retirement age, Maureen was still a towering, (metaphorically) and very active figure in neonatology, her follow up research, and her insights were very valuable for all of us.

I remember her as someone who was easy to talk too, interested and interesting, who made contributions to neonatology which will be quoted for a very long time, and who was humble enough to be open to new interpretations of her results as her subjects aged.

Maureen showed that extremely low birth weight babies mostly functioned very well as they entered adolescence and adulthood. She showed the importance of having a good control group from similar backgrounds to the preterm subjects. She showed more clearly than anyone else at the time how much test scores improve over time for the majority of preterm babies who have developmental evaluations in the first couple of years.

She will be sorely missed.