BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH


 Joan Alice Heenan was born in New York, the eldest of three

children of a surgeon father and a nurse mother who wrote for the

Saturday Evening Post for many years. She was graduated from Elizabeth

Seton School in 1954 and the Lenox Hill Hospital School of Nursing in

1957. In 1958 she married Alfred Canal, an accountant with Arthur Young

and Company and then with Bristol Myers until his death in 1967. With

their three children, she then spent two years at the familial home in

Bogota, Columbia, prior to moving to Gainesville, Florida, in 1972.

During nine of these years she worked in pediatrics, public health,

psychiatry, and surgery in clinical nursing and instructorships.

 She received the Bachelor of Health Science with high honors in

1978 and the Master of Education in 1979 from the University of Florida,

Gainesville. During her doctoral studies in the foundations of

education program, she developed special interests in personality and

learning and became project director of the Nutrition Education and

Training program (NET) for the Institute of Food and Agricultural

Sciences, University of Florida. She was responsible for preparation of

proposals and the development and evaluation of nutrition education

materials for teachers and students in preschool settings. On

completion of this program, she received an appointment as program

evaluator and grant writer for the Technical Assistance Health Resource

Group (TAHRG), University of Florida, with responsibility for the

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