Columbia Nursing Spring 2021

Nursing Columbia

Spring 2021

ART IN THE

TIME OF CRISIS

The Magazine of Columbia University School of Nursing

RESEARCHING THE EFFECTS OF RACISM ON HEALTH ENABLING CAREERS OF SERVICE

HELP INSPIRE COLUMBIA NURSING’S NEXT GENERATION

LEAVING A LEGACY “Columbia Nursing provides an outstanding education that prepares students for life, to be leaders in their profession, and to serve their communities.

Having benefited greatly from that fine education myself, I’ve chosen to fund an endowed scholarship to pay it forward by supporting the education of our future nursing leaders.”

— Katharine “Posie” Carpenter, MS’88

CONTACT US TO DISCUSS YOUR LEGACY:

nursing.columbia.edu/giving/planned-giving For more information, please contact Janice Grady, executive director, Development and Alumni Relations, at 212-305-1088 or jar2272@cumc.columbia.edu.

From the Dean

Columbia Nursing Processes the Pandemic and Reckons with Racism

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ince this time last year, the pandemic has killed well over half a million Americans, a disproportionate number of whom were of color, underserved by the health-care system, or both. Over the same period, a critical reckoning with racial injustice, including systemic racism in health care, has roiled our country.

These dual crises have taken a heavy toll on the nursing community—even at an institution as privileged as Columbia—especially on our students who served on the front lines, supporting patients and helping families communicate with their ill loved ones. Most had little or no clinical preparation for what they encountered. They experienced suffering and death at levels that overwhelmed even veteran faculty.

Two second-semester DNP students in the psychiatric mental health doctoral program—Janine Inez and Alden Bush—recognized their peers’ and colleagues’ need to come to grips with these experiences. So they co-founded “Art in the Time of Crisis,” a schoolwide initiative that invited students, faculty, administrators, staff, and alumni to express pandemic-related trauma, stress, and other emotions, as well as their anguish over racial injustice. The resulting works—photography, painting, prose, poetry, music, and dance— reflect heartbreak, hope, and even humor.

The project is the focus of one of this issue’s features, as well as of a virtual exhibition and video that was held earlier this spring.

The exhibition will also be available online through Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery.

The intention behind our national reckoning with racism is reflected in another of the issue’s features. In early 2020—just before the pandemic hit—we launched a virtual Center for Research on People of Color (CRPC), to better promote health equity and racial justice through research, education, and practice.

The center’s interdisciplinary and racially and ethnically diverse faculty is devoted to exploring the health disparities that racial inequity and injustice cause and to identifying the ways that nursing can address them. Its bold research agenda includes investigations

into how adverse life experiences affect cardiovascular health in marginalized adults; how racism, discrimination, and cardiovascular risk factors affect preterm birth rates; and more.

In addition, the center supports scholars, especially those from minority communities, by offering mentoring, career opportunities, pilot grants, and an array of learning opportunities.

The issue’s third feature illuminates Columbia Nursing’s dedication to equity in health care in yet another way—its presentation of service scholarships to students headed for careers in underserved communities. This year, three students won National Health Service Corps Scholarships, which cover up to four years of tuition and fees plus a living stipend, in return for working at an approved site in a medically underserved community. In addition, four students in the Masters Direct Entry program earned $30,000 each toward their tuition and fees from the Paul D. Coverdell Fellows program.

This program provides financial assistance to returning Peace Corps volunteers pursuing graduate or postgraduate degrees. Coverdell Fellows must complete internships in underserved U.S. communities; our students do this by working with Project STAY, providing health-care services for 14- to 24-year-olds living with HIV, as well as LGBTQ+ and justice-involved youth.

The Columbia Nursing community, like the nation, has weathered a lot in the past year. We have also learned a lot—about ourselves, our neighbors, and each other. As we have always done, we will share and practice what have learned, so as to be the best providers we can be. As harrowing as the past year has been, I’ve found myself often feeling inspired and hopeful.

I hope you’ll find yourself feeling so, too, as you read this issue.

LORRAINE FRAZIER, PhD, RN, FAAN Dean, Columbia University School of Nursing Mary O’Neil Mundinger Professor of Nursing Senior Vice President, Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Columbia Nursing is the magazine of the Columbia University School of Nursing and is published twice a year

Nursing Columbia

Lorraine Frazier, PhD, RN, FAAN Dean, Columbia University School of Nursing Mary O’Neil Mundinger Professor of Nursing Senior Vice President, Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Produced by the Office of Strategic Communications and Marketing

Spring 2021 Contents

Linda Muskat Rim, Editor-in-Chief Associate Dean, Strategic Communications and Marketing

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Lara Philipps, Production Supervisor Assistant Director, Strategic Communications and Marketing

ALUMNI NEWS EDITORS:

Reva Feinstein, MPA Associate Dean, Development and Alumni Relations Janice Rafferty Grady Executive Director, Development and Alumni Relations Janine Handfus Associate Director, Annual Fund

DESIGN AND ART DIRECTION:

Eson Chan

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS:

Anne Harding Andrea Kott Kenneth Miller

Sharon Sobel Manager, Alumni Relations

BOARD OF VISITORS:

Tina Alvarado Shanahan ’81, MHA, BS Rear Admiral (Retired), Senior Health Care Executive, U.S. Navy, Nurse Corps Raleigh, NC Brenda Barrowclough Brodie ’65, RN Durham, NC Paul Coyne ’16, DNP, MBA, MSF, RN, AGPCNP-BC President & Co-Founder, Inspiren; Assistant Vice President, Clinical Practice & Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, Hospital for Special Surgery New York, NY Delphine Mendez de Leon ’78, MBA, MPH, RN Director, Innovaccer, Inc. New York, NY Dorothy Simpson Dorion ’57, MS, RN Jacksonville, FL Angela Clarke Duff ’70, RN Forest Hills, NY Marjorie Harrison Fleming ’69, RN Chair Seabrook Island, SC Susan Fox ’84, MBA, RN President & CEO, White Plains Hospital White Plains, NY Susan Furlaud ’12, MS, RN New York, NY Ellen Gottesman Garber ’76, RN New York, NY Karen Hein, MD Jacksonville, VT

Mary Turner Henderson ’64, RN San Francisco, CA Wilhelmina Manzano, MA, RN, NEA-BC Senior Vice President, Chief Nursing Executive, & Chief Quality Officer, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Regional Hospital Network New York, NY Duncan V. Neuhauser, PhD Blue Hill, ME Janet Ready ’81, MBA, MPH, RN, FACHE Chief Operating Officer, St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center Syracuse, NY Patricia Riley ’76, BS, MPH, RN, CNM, FACNM, FAAN Captain (Retired), U.S. Public Health Service Atlanta, GA Susan Salka, MBA President & CEO, AMN Healthcare San Diego, CA Sara Shipley Stone ’69, MS, RN Brooksville, ME Edwidge J. Thomas ’93 ’05, DNP, ANP Clinical Director, Mount Sinai Health System New York, NY Jasmine L. Travers ’16, PhD, MS, RN Assistant Professor, New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing New York, NY

4 Research Roundup · Columbia Nursing’s Caceres Leads Effort to Craft First-Ever Scientific Statement on LGBTQ Cardiovascular Health · Sexual Identity Disclosure Is Linked to Lower Death Risk for Sexual Minority Women · Nursing Home Telehealth Use Jumps After Regulations Are Relaxed in Response to COVID-19

26 Faculty Publications 29 Alumni · Letter from the Alumni Association President · Class Notes · In Memoriam

Please address all correspondence to: press.nursing@columbia.edu

Alumni are invited to update their contact information by emailing sonalumni@columbia.edu or calling 212-305-5999

Subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter: nursing.columbia.edu Like us on Facebook: @ColumbiaNursing Follow us on Instagram: @columbianursing Follow us on Twitter: @ColumbiaNursing Follow us on LinkedIn: Columbia University School of Nursing Subscribe to us on YouTube: Columbia University School of Nursing

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Art in the Time of Crisis

By Andrea Kott The Columbia Nursing community uses art to address the pandemic and racial injustice.

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Color Guard

By Anne Harding Columbia Nursing’s new Center for Research on People of Color examines the effects of racism on health and seeks solutions that will overturn centuries of inequities.

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Rewarding Commitment

By Kenneth Miller Service scholarships support Columbia Nursing students who aim for careers in underserved communities. Meet four students and two alumni using their scholarships to change the world.

ON THE COVER: Erika Chen, MS ’16, took part in Columbia Nursing’s “Art in the Time of Crisis” initiative. Photograph by JörgSpring Meyer.2021

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Research

Roundup

G E T T Y IM A G E S

Columbia Nursing’s Caceres Leads Effort to Craft First-Ever Scientific Statement on LGBTQ Cardiovascular Health

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exual and gender minority (SGM) adults face psychological and social stressors that may contribute to worse cardiovascular health, and a multi-pronged approach is necessary to better understand their unique heart health risks and develop effective interventions, according to the American Heart Association (AHA) in its first Scientific Statement on cardiovascular health in LGBTQ individuals. Billy Caceres, PhD, RN, an assistant professor at the School of Nursing, chaired the writing group that crafted the statement.

“This is particularly important now, at a time when there is increased awareness of health inequities related to unequal treatment and discrimination in the U.S.,” Caceres says in an AHA press release accompanying the statement. “LGBTQ individuals are delaying primary care and preventative visits because there is a great fear of being treated differently. Being treated differently often means receiving inadequate or inferior care because of sexual orientation or gender identity.”

About 11 million LGBTQ individuals live in the U.S., Caceres and his colleagues note in the statement. “Although LGBTQ people are often grouped together, subgroups within this population have distinct health risks and exposures; multiple studies have identified variations in CVD [cardiovascular disease] risk by sex assigned at birth, gender identity, sexual orientation, and race,” they add.

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The AHA statement offers several recommendations for improving the quality of research on SGM populations, including developing standardized measures of sexual orientation and gender identity and partnering with LGBTQ communities to develop these measures and conduct research.

The authors note that there is considerable distrust of the healthcare profession among SGM individuals, most of whom report having been discriminated against by health-care providers.

They recommend that LGBTQ content be included in health professions curriculums, postgraduate training, and continuing education for practicing clinicians. Clinicians should also be trained to assess sexual orientation and gender identity and include this data in electronic health records, the authors note.

“It is paramount to include content about LGBTQ health in clinical training and licensure requirements in order to address these cardiovascular health disparities,” according to Caceres. “Health-care systems need to play a significant role—to enact policies to encourage and support researchers and health-care professionals to ask these questions in a respectful manner and to implement structures that emphasize the clinical importance of understanding the many layers related to caring for people with a minority sexual orientation or gender identity.”

The statement was published online Oct. 8, 2020, in Circulation.

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pening up to family members about sexual identity may reduce mortality risk for sexual minority women (SMW), according to new findings.

Women who had disclosed their sexual identity to their entire immediate family had a 70% lower mortality rate than those who had disclosed it to fewer than one-third of their family members, Tonda Hughes, PhD, the Henrik H. Bendixen Professor of International Nursing (in Psychiatry), and her colleagues found.

The findings are from the Chicago Health and Life Experiences of Women (CHLEW) Study, a 21-year longitudinal study of 812 SMW. Hughes is principal investigator on the study.

SMW face disparities in mental and physical health and are more likely to engage in risky health behaviors, Hughes and her team note in their report.

Among 775 SMW enrolled in the CHLEW study in 2000–01 or 2010–12, 49, or 6.3%, had died by 2019. Overall, 52.7% of the study participants had disclosed their sexual identity to 100% of their immediate family, 38.6% had disclosed to at least 33% but less than 100%, and 8.8% had disclosed to less than 33%. Among the 70 women who had disclosed to few or none of their immediate family members, 14% (10/70) had died, compared to only 4% who died among the 408 who disclosed to all immediate family members. “Identity disclosure has been linked to higher levels of self-esteem, sexual identity acceptance and integration. Disclosure to family members may be particularly important for overall health, especially from a life course perspective,” the authors write.

“Understanding in which contexts individuals are more likely to disclose their identity to all family members versus some or none, and the pathways through which disclosure improves as opposed to harms health, is an important next step in this work,” they conclude.

The findings were published online Jan. 30, 2021, in Social Science & Medicine.

G E T T Y IM A G E S

Sexual Identity Disclosure Is Linked to Lower Death Risk for Sexual Minority Women

Nursing Home Telehealth Use Jumps After Regulations Are Relaxed in Response to COVID-19

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ursing homes’ use of telehealth increased more than elevenfold after Medicare eased rules and regulations on virtual care, according to new findings from Columbia Nursing.

Gregory Alexander, PhD, a professor of nursing, and his colleagues say the relaxation of federal telehealth rules should continue in order to help nursing home residents stay socially connected, preserve limited resources such as personal protective equipment, and allow for the delivery of timely care while maintaining social distancing.

On March 6, 2020, in response to the pandemic, Medicare loosened its rules to allow providers to deliver more services through telehealth. Alexander and his colleagues hypothesized that this change would lead to an increase in nursing homes’ use of virtual health-care delivery. To investigate, they surveyed 664 U.S. nursing homes from January to August, giving each facility a cumulative score for telehealth use. While 16% didn’t use telehealth at all, 5% reported maximum use, and 79% reported partial telehealth implementation.

After Medicare authorized expanded telehealth use, the researchers found, nursing homes employed virtual health-care applications in patient evaluations 11.24 times more than they had before the rule change.

“Without a vaccine and electronic connections to the outside world, nursing home residents could spend weeks, months, or even years in a facility without visitors other than regular staff,” Alexander and his co-authors write. “This could have a profound effect on resident outcomes including depression rates, mobility, etc. One solution is to encourage the proliferation of telehealth with continued relaxed regulations.”

Alexander’s co-authors on the study, titled “An Evaluation of Telehealth Expansion in U.S. Nursing Homes,” are Kimberly Powell, PhD, of the University of Missouri Sinclair School of Nursing, and Chelsea Deroche, PhD, of the University of Missouri School of Medicine.

The study was published online Nov. 20, 2020, in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

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ART

IN THE TIME OF CRISIS

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Columbia Nursing Spring 2021

Columbia Nursing Community Uses Art to Address the Pandemic and Racial Injustice

P H O T O S C O U R T E SY O F L IN C O L N C E N T E R F O R T H E P E RF O RMIN G A R T S

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he two-minute video opens to the haunting strains of “Amazing Grace,” as an almost-empty subway car pulls out of New York City’s Lincoln Center station. That the train and the performance hall plaza are nearly deserted is no surprise, given the COVID-19 pandemic. What is surprising is the appearance of scrubs-clad Erika Chen, MS ’16, as the Center’s featured soloist, performing two starkly contrasting verses of the 18th-century hymn. Her beautiful rendition captures both the melancholy of a city in the grip of a plague and the hope of better days to come.

The video was among dozens of entries in “Art in the Time of Crisis,” a Columbia Nursing initiative

Janine Inez, MS ’20

Alden Bush, MS ’20

that invited students, faculty, administrators, staff, and alumni to submit narrative writing, poetry, painting, photography, music, or dance to portray their feelings about the dual crises that have roiled the country during the past year: the pandemic and the racial justice reckoning. The initiative culminated this spring in a virtual presentation and video showcasing 20 selected pieces; ultimately, they will become an online exhibition at Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery.

ART AS AN EMOTIONAL OUTLET Art is a well-known outlet for human emotion. If ever there was a time when nurses and other health-care workers needed such an outlet, it has been since the onset of the pandemic (which has decimated millions of lives and taken a disproportionate toll on African Americans and other people of color, who commonly lack access to care) and the killing of George Floyd (which highlighted systemic racism in America).

Recognizing this need, DNP students Janine Inez, MS ’20, and Alden Bush, MS ’20, co-founded “Art in the Time of Crisis” to provide their peers and colleagues with a way to deal with the trauma, stress, and other emotions related to the pandemic and their anguish over racial injustice. “We’ve been besieged from all sides,” says Inez, who, like Bush, is a second-

Spring 2021

Grief and Hope in the Time of COVID Erika Chen, MS ’16

View a video of the Art in the Time of Crisis collection.

SCAN USING YOUR PHONE CAMERA.

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“ This endeavor was an outlet for students, faculty, and staff to safely comment on the pandemic, as well as political events that they didn’t feel permitted to speak about in other areas of their lives,” says Inez.

semester student in Columbia Nursing’s doctoral program in psychiatric mental health. “This endeavor was an outlet for students, faculty, and staff to safely comment on the pandemic, as well as political events that they didn’t feel permitted to speak about in other areas of their lives.”

According to Jeanne Churchill, an assistant professor of nursing and an advisor to the project, evidence-based research suggests that engaging in artistic expression can promote health-care workers’ wellbeing, especially as they process their feelings about death and dying. Churchill, who assigns narratives to help her students reflect on their clinical experiences, noticed the particular toll that the health and racial crises were taking on students. Those working on the front lines as paid nurse technicians, even though they had yet to finish their clinical education, “saw more trauma and death in eight months than I’ve seen in

Essential NYC Anthony Pho, PhD ’20

40-plus years,” she says. “The initiative is giving students and all health-care providers the ability to process the crises happening in this country and the world. It is helping them to work through their emotions, which will help them to become better providers in the long run.”

The project also offered a safe platform from which students could advocate for racial justice, Churchill adds. “Ever since the killing of George Floyd, Columbia Nursing students have become very involved in working to raise awareness of racial injustices that go beyond issues of health care. They want more information.

They want more dialogue. They want to be involved.”

A PROJECT IS BORN Inez and Bush began by researching how creating art can help nurses and other health-care workers become better providers. They then crafted a proposal, which they presented to Dean Lorraine Frazier, PhD; Vice Dean Judy Honig, EdD ’77, DNP ’05; and Churchill, who unanimously gave them the green light to begin collecting art. “Just as students were starting to wrestle with the weight of everything that was taking place, we got the go-ahead to develop the project,” Inez recounts.

A lifelong writer and poet, Inez knows all about the healing properties of creating art. “When I am overwhelmed with emotion, I make art. It’s how I’m able to digest it,” she says. For example, to come to grips with her feelings about mortality—her patients’ as well as her own—she wrote a poem titled “War Offering”: I do not think you have to be a soldier to go to war.

I think a war is taking place in our neighborhoods, our hospitals, our homes.

Insidious terminologies snake their way like vines into our mouths and our minds— “frontlines,” “body count,” “hero.”

We are all in the ethos of a soldier in the trenches but the enemy is invisible And in truth could reside in any of one of our teammates, our loved ones, ourselves.

“Ever since COVID-19 happened, death has been at the forefront of my mind,” Inez says. “This initiative was born out of my reckoning with my own mortality and what it means to live a meaningful life.” At the same time, it stemmed from her overwhelming empathy for peers working on the front lines. (Severe asthma prevented her from joining them.) “We had barely any

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clinical experience or training about postmortem care,” she explains. “My friends told heartbreaking stories about losing patients and not knowing if it was because of their inexperience. They were all traumatized.”

Writing and developing the initiative also gave Inez valuable perspective on patients’ experiences. “When we do art, we put ourselves in patients’ shoes. We think about what it means to be sick, to be taken care of, and to take care of someone. It makes us better providers.”

TAPPING INTO HIDDEN EMOTIONS For Bush, who worked as a visitor screener and translator during the pandemic’s early days, writing poetry facilitated the release of emotions that he says health-care workers rarely reveal. “I had nights when I couldn’t sleep, when I’d see something on Facebook and break down crying. I was bottling up raw emotion, and my body was having a physical reaction.”

He says he experienced emotional liberation in writing

Spring 2021

One of Many Solo Wanders Kelly Hafermann Staff, Senior Academic Affairs Coordinator

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“21 Days,” a poem that depicts a beloved father on a ventilator, dreaming that his late wife Consuelo is with him and hearing the voice of his daughter, even though he is dying in a hospital ICU without them: The patriarch continues to fight for his life The tug and pull of life and death He dreams of Ecuador Shifting through fields of pink roses He takes a deep breath and sees his wife Consuelo is laying down watching the skies The nurse wipes his eyes and adjusts the ventilator settings Muffled voices and writing on glass walls He turns around as the sunlight blinds him Squinting for a moment he glances “Are you calling me, Daughter?”

“Eres tu mi chiquita?”

“Is that you my little one?”

“Death is a topic that can easily become taboo, but death and the process of dying are powerful teachers,” says Bush, who plans to care for underrepresented populations once he graduates. “Being able to navigate them makes you more capable of being with patients and families in their hardest times.”

In addition to giving students and nurses the opportunity to explore and express their feelings about death and dying, the initiative allowed them to take deeper emotional dives into their feelings about the risks they assume when treating COVID-19 patients, as well as about their commitment to racial justice, says Rita Charon, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Also the founder and executive director of Columbia’s Division of Narrative Medicine and the curator of the exhibition, she adds that “neither of these feelings is in primary colors in ordinary nursing during ordinary times. The installation is critical now because it helps us capture feelings that may be less visible in ‘normal’ times.”

Among these less visible feelings is a “crisis of conscience” that Charon says all providers experience at some point. “We all have moments of fear, and sometimes we act on them,” she says, referring to students or clinicians who didn’t work on the front lines for fear of infecting their children or elderly parents, among other reasons. “We know what the right thing to do is, and we’re prevented either because of personal circumstances or because we don’t have the courage,” she continues. Creating art gives nurses and other providers the critical distance they need to ask themselves, without self-recrimination: “Was I there fully? Did I do enough?”

A Fractured Nation Denise (Buckawick) Kooperman, BS ’70 OPPOSITE PAGE: Our Sons, Our Brothers, Our Classmates, Our Friends Susan Evans, BS ’65

“This initiative,” adds Charon, “has helped nurses take pride in their professional identity, put in perspective what more they could have done, and take stock of their shortcomings without feeling like they’ve failed.”

Moreover, it has helped the school community give voice to feelings about racial injustice, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and heightened awareness of diversity and tolerance. In a photograph by Susan Evans, BS ’65, for example, three African American Brad dolls stand beneath the letters “B,” “L,” and “M.” And in “Fractured Nation,” by Denise (Buckawick) Kooperman, BS ’70 , a rainbow of colors brings to life the textures in a simple piece of fabric.

Bush, who is Latino, says his heritage inspired him to speak out about racial and cultural inequities in health and health care. “Seeing the direct effects of COVID-19 on communities of color, compounded by calls for racial justice, has inspired me to advocate more, fight more, and lift my voice more in defense of my patients and all communities of color.”

“Death is a topic that can easily become taboo, but death and the process of dying are powerful teachers,” says Bush.

THEMES RANGING FROM PERIL TO HOPE The exhibition encompasses an array of themes ranging from peril and foreboding, to witnessing death, to activism and racial justice, and, ultimately, to hope.

Charon emphasizes that the works have been “mind-

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JÖRG ME YER

Rush Hour Joseph Herman MDE-DNP Student

Spring 2020 Fifth Avenue NYC Dorothy Simpson Dorion, BS ’57

Sunset with Benches Jeanne Churchill Faculty, Assistant Professor

fully ordered,” so that viewers can emerge feeling hopeful. “We’re inviting people to share with us a very dark time. We bring them through the rough stuff, but we owe it to our audience to bring them out at the end not in a state of despair but of pride and hope, to show them that our nurses have faced these challenges so courageously.”

Many of the featured pieces celebrate nurses’ and other providers’ bravery and power. Indeed, running throughout the exhibition is the message that while the fight against the pandemic and racial injustice continues, hope and healing are on the horizon.

Such hope emanates from a photograph by MDEDNP student Joseph Herman, which shows a building half in shadow and half in sunlight, and from a painting

by Dorothy Simpson Dorion, BS ’57, which shows one side of Fifth Avenue in darkness and the other in light.

Hope and healing also radiate from Churchill’s photograph “Sunset with Benches,” which depicts a stretch of New Jersey shore where people sit to watch the sunset. “That’s my happy place,” Churchill says.

“The sun sets every day, and then it rises, so we looked at the sunset as a sign of hope. It gave comfort and peace to us every night.”

Meggan Jo Kent, MS ’16, pursued the themes of hope and healing in a short narrative about the steadfastness of nature. She wrote: “The world is still turning. The waves are still crashing on the shore. Pollution has significantly decreased and dissipated. Maybe us humans need to be more conscious on the impact we have on our planet. We can learn so many good lessons from this. I find hope in the sunshine. I hope you do too.”

CREATING A LEGACY The power of “Art in the Time of Crisis” extends beyond the works themselves to the legacy they will leave for the school: a tribute to the entire community and the critical role it has played in caring for affected New Yorkers and their families. “What this initiative brings to the surface is that taking care of patients is what matters most,” Churchill says. “That is why our students are becoming nurses. It is why they are here.”

Bush says that participating in the initiative reinforced the bonds among the various segments of the Columbia Nursing community. “Whether we’re alumni, faculty, staff, or students, we have all been going through these crises together, sharing hope, sharing darkness, and now leaving a legacy to commemorate this period of time.” Adds Inez, “I hope that people will see their own journey and themselves in these pieces. I hope that they’ll feel heard, and that this will spark introspection and help them process what has happened to them.” 

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“What this initiative brings to the surface is that taking care of patients is what matters most,” Churchill says. “That is why our students are becoming nurses. It is why they are here.”

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Columbia Nursing’s new Center for Research on People of Color was established to examine the effects of racism on health and seek solutions that will overturn centuries of inequities.

COLORGUARD

By Anne Harding

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G E T T Y IM A G E S

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OVID-19 wasn’t the first disease outbreak in the United States to expose health disparities rooted in systemic racism. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, the few studies that reported on patients’ race found that Blacks were less likely than whites to contract the virus, but more likely to die if they did become infected. Some contemporary scholars suggested that the segregated, cramped housing conditions many Blacks were forced into after leaving the South for big northern cities might have been a factor in their increased risk of mortality.

More than a century later, housing and other social determinants of health—which are defined by the World Health Organization as “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age . . . shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels”—are increasingly acknowledged as the main source of health inequities across U.S. populations. And these disparities persist, on multiple fronts.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Black women’s rates of pregnancy-related mortality are more than triple those of white women. Black and Latino adults also have significantly higher rates of hypertension, obesity, and diabetes than whites, CDC data shows. And while all U.S. ethnic groups saw declines in heart disease mortality from 1999 to 2017, Blacks are still more likely to die from heart disease than whites.

COLORGUARD Finding explanations, seeking solutions

Hitting the ground running Taylor started at Columbia Nursing on March 1, 2020, just a few days before the pandemic slammed New York City and the university closed its campuses to all but essential workers. The CRPC’s official opening had been set for later that month, but it had to be rescheduled to October.

“We really hit the ground running,” Taylor says. “I was able to obtain a grant from the Office of the Vice Provost to support the anti-racism speaker series, so we’re off to a great start.” Enobong Branch, PhD, the

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author of Black in America: The Paradox of the Color Line, inaugurated the series with a well-attended talk on November 5, 2020. Amadou Gaye, PhD, a staff scientist at the National Human Genome Research Institute, gave a talk titled “Omics Study of Social Disadvantage in African Americans: How Adverse Conditions Get Under the Skin” in February 2021. Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, a professor at Yale who is co-chair of President Biden’s COVID-19 task force and was recently tapped to lead a White House task force focused on coronavirus health equity, will deliver a third talk in the series.

Taylor’s own research has always focused on communities of color, she notes. “All of my work to this date has been in this area,” she says. “I started out doing my research in Detroit. I’m originally from Michigan; I grew up in Inkster, a small town outside Detroit.”

Taylor earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Wayne State University College of Nursing in Detroit and achieved board certification as a pediatric nurse practitioner. She went on to get her PhD in urban health nursing at Wayne State and did postdoctoral work in urban health aging at the university’s Institute of Gerontology. Taylor also completed fellowships in molecular genetics at Georgetown University and in cardiovascular genetic epidemiology at Washington University in St. Louis.

She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019 and has received multiple commendations and awards, including the American Nurses Association’s 2018 Mary Mahoney Award for opening and advancing equal opportunities in nursing for members of minority groups.

Stress, genes, and cardiovascular health While at Yale, where she was a tenured associate professor and associate dean of diversity and inclusion, Taylor was co-principal investigator for the Intergenerational Blood Pressure Study, funded by the National Institutes of Health. InterGEN, as the study is known, enrolled 250 3- to 5-year-olds from Head Start programs across Connecticut, along with their mothers, collecting DNA samples and surveying them every six months to look at how psychosocial factors JÖRG ME YER

Columbia Nursing’s new virtual Center for Research on People of Color (CRPC) is supporting ground-breaking investigations into why and how these disparities occur and what can be done to counteract the effects of discrimination, from the individual to the societal level. “African Americans have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic in terms of rates of infection by COVID, as well as more severe outcomes,” notes Elizabeth Corwin, PhD, vice dean of strategic and innovative research at Columbia Nursing. “Our research is a foundation for helping to explain why that is.

“The center could not have been initiated at a better time,” she adds, “both because of the potential contributions that it would make but also just the societal readiness to hear this, to understand this, and to stop this disparity.”

Corwin helped recruit Jacquelyn Taylor, PhD, now Columbia’s Helen Pettit Professor of Nursing, from New York University to be the CRPC’s founding executive director. “She was the right person to bring this new opportunity to the school,” Corwin says. “She’s the person in the nation, the nurse faculty in the nation, who could do this.

At the same time, Columbia Nursing is taking steps to increase representation of people of color on its faculty, Corwin says. “We’ve increased our recruitment of other faculty of color, we’ve increased our efforts to recruit African Americans, we’re reaching out in ways that we hadn’t really done before as a school in terms of recruiting from predominantly Black communities and societies.”

Plans for the CRPC were in place before 2020, when the pandemic’s outsize impact on Black and Latino communities, as well as the nationwide protests against police brutality, brought the health effects of systemic racism to the forefront of the national conversation.

“We were ahead on pushing this agenda for research on people of color,” says Taylor. “The Center for Research on People of Color is important, timely, and vital to examining health equity and social justice and its effects on health outcomes.

“For too long, people of color have not been sufficiently represented in health research, which has perpetuated injustice across the field and broader society,” she adds. “The CRPC seeks to promote health equity and justice through high-quality studies, mentorship for early career researchers, and learning opportunities open to all.”

Taylor hopes to begin offering pilot grants to junior faculty soon.

“We’re always looking to recruit more underrepresented minority faculty,” she adds. “I envision that people from around the world will want to participate in our center.”

such as perceived discrimination, parenting stress, and general stress affected blood pressure in both the mothers and the children. The study has yielded 30 articles and counting, according to Taylor, who welcomes collaborations with other researchers interested in analyzing the biobanked samples and the “plethora of data” she and her colleagues collected on all 500 study participants.

In 2017, Taylor received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers at the beginning of their careers.

The award continues to support her ongoing investigation of interactions between next-generation sequencing and the environment on blood pressure in African Americans. Titled “Whole Genome Sequencing as a Screening Tool for Cardiovascular Diseases Among African Americans in the Community,” the study is now part of the CRPC’s research portfolio.

One goal of the study is to reduce health disparities by using whole genome sequencing for early detection and treatment of heart disease among Blacks in both community and clinical settings, Taylor explains. For example, gene testing could be used to detect familial hypercholesterolemia, which causes people to develop sky-high cholesterol levels at a young age, increasing their risk of heart disease, stroke, and death. “If you can identify it early on,” she says, “you can put someone on Lipitor or some kind of statin, and they won’t die. You could save a lot of lives.”

But representation of Black participants in genome-wide association studies lags far behind that of whites, Taylor notes. “We know that minorities are very much underrepresented in genetics research.

How can we confidently make health-policy decisions, treatment decisions, and decisions on how we’re going to analyze data if you don’t have a large proportion of the population included? We know that’s not a good way to conduct science.

“We know from previous research,” she adds, “that what you may find in one population may be totally different from what you find in another.”

“Promoting the health of people of color” Billy Caceres, PhD, an assistant professor at the School of Nursing and the Program for the Study of LGBT Health at Columbia University, has added an affiliation with the CRPC to his portfolio. “The school has a long history of promoting the health of marginalized populations,” he says. “The center is sort of like the next step—it’s having a formal process for promoting the health of people of color.”

Caceres is the principal investigator on several studies of how adverse life experiences affect cardiovascular health in marginalized adults, with a focus on sexual and gender minority populations.

“When we think of people of color, that term includes a lot of different people with a lot of cultural needs and cultural values that require attention,” he notes. These populations need to be concisely and clearly defined, he adds, and studies should look at differences within populations and develop interventions that will reduce any disparities.

As members of the world’s largest health profession, often caring for disadvantaged patients, nurses are uniquely prepared to do

JACQUELYN TAYLOR, PHD

research on health equity, Caceres says. “Social justice is one of the core tenets of the profession,” he notes. The interdisciplinary nature of nursing—drawing on biology, genetics, psychology, sociology, and other fields—also gives nurses a unique perspective on how to understand and address social determinants of health, he adds.

The roster of the CRPC’s affiliated researchers is also “very interdisciplinary,” Caceres points out. Genetic epidemiologists, informatics specialists, and a physician are among those who have signed on so far. “That’s not by accident,” he says. “I think that’s what we needed.”

Veronica Barcelona, PhD, a public health nurse and reproductive epidemiologist, joined Columbia Nursing as an assistant professor of nursing on January 1, 2021, and is also affiliated with the CRPC. She did a postdoctoral fellowship with Taylor at Yale and now uses epigenomics to study the role of stressors such as racism, discrimination, and cardiovascular risk factors in preterm birth.

“The idea behind epigenomics is that negative environmental stressors, like racism and discrimination, acculturation, stress, violence, any other stressors you may have, can affect our epigenome and change the way our genes are expressed,” Barcelona explains.

“These changes can be pretty quick and they can happen in a short amount of time. They’re also reversible and heritable, so you can pass them down through generations. That’s why they’re interesting biological targets to understand, because hopefully we can change some of them.”

Barcelona values Taylor’s mentorship and her dedication to recruiting faculty of color to the CRPC. “She’s incredible as a mentor and as a thought leader in minority health, especially related to genomics and cardiovascular health research.

“The School of Nursing’s commitment to funding and supporting scientists who are doing research with people of color and communities of color is so important,” Barcelona concludes. “We have scientists who come from those communities and want to conduct responsible and important research to benefit those communities. Part of that also comes with education of students and faculty, increasing the visibility of the importance of this work and doing it right.” 

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REWARDING COMMITMENT A

D AV ID E B O N A Z ZI

nyone who spends much time reading the headlines these days can’t be blamed for concluding that altruism has fallen out of favor. But a surefire way to restore one’s faith in humanity is to talk with Columbia Nursing students about their career ambitions. “About 80 percent of our enrollees say they’d like to work in underserved areas,” says Judy Wolfe, EdD, associate dean of student affairs. “They want to make a difference in places that really need it.”

Even when that desire runs up against financial realities, such students (with the school’s support) find ways to reach for their dreams. And two scholarships at Columbia Nursing aim directly at encouraging the impulse to serve.

The first is the National Health Service Corps Scholars program, administered by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA, pronounced “her-suh”). A HRSA scholarship pays up to four years of tuition and fees, as well as a living stipend, in return for a pledge

to work at an approved site in a medically underserved community. (At least one year of service is required for each year of support, with a minimum commitment of two years.) Open to students pursuing postgraduate degrees in primary care nursing, as well as in medicine and dentistry, the scholarship attracts about 2,000 applicants each year—and accepts only about 10 percent of them.

Candidates must demonstrate a commitment to caring for underserved populations; other selection factors include academic excellence, financial need, and a disadvantaged background.

In September 2020, the school introduced another service scholarship: the Paul D. Coverdell Fellows program, administered by the United States Peace Corps. The program provides financial assistance to returning Peace Corps volunteers who wish to pursue graduate or postgraduate degrees. All Coverdell Fellows must complete internships in underserved communities in the U.S., where they can expand on the skills they learned while volunteering abroad.

Service scholarships support Columbia Nursing students who aim for careers in underserved communities.

By Kenneth Miller

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REWARDING COMMITMENT At Columbia Nursing, students accepted as Coverdell Fellows receive $30,000 toward their tuition and fees for the Masters Direct Entry (MDE) program; they may also be eligible for needs-based scholarships from the Office of Development. To fulfill the internship requirement, participants work with Project STAY (operated by the Harlem Health Promotion Center within Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health), which provides health-care services for young people aged 14 to 24 who are living with HIV, as well as LGBTQ+ and justiceinvolved youth.

The Coverdell Fellows program was initiated at the school by Assistant Professor Ana Kelly, PhD, a Peace

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Corps veteran who served for two years in Namibia.

“When I joined the faculty in 2017, I was surprised to learn that we didn’t have a Coverdell program yet, because it seemed like such a perfect fit,” she recalls.

When Kelly proposed the idea to Dean Lorraine Frazier, PhD, “she told me to go for it. She’s been incredibly supportive.”

This year, three Columbia Nursing students won HRSA scholarships, and four Coverdell Fellows began their MDE studies. Here, we introduce some of these extraordinary individuals—along with two alumni whose budding careers help illustrate the impact of a well-placed investment in education.

KATIE KLEINBERG, MS ’21 COVERDELL FELLOW A native of Westport, Connecticut, Kleinberg majored in biobehavioral health at Penn State University. “I wanted to go into health care, but I didn’t know in what capacity,” she recalls. “All I was sure of was that I wanted to make a difference.” Hoping for clarity—and eager to see the world—she joined the Peace Corps after graduating in 2016. Sent to Mozambique, she was assigned to teach English at a village secondary school. But she wound up spending much of her time instructing teens on sexual and reproductive health, including how to make menstrual pads from

towels and plastic bags. “The dropout rate for girls was really high, because so many of them were getting pregnant. And they’d miss days of school whenever they got their periods.”

Electrified by the experience, Kleinberg sought out something similar when her tour was over. Moving to New York City, she took a job as a health-care associate at Planned Parenthood, doing birth control and abortion counseling. She also assisted the clinic’s nurse practitioners and soon realized that she’d found her calling.

“They were the ones who advocated for patients and acted as a trusted resource, which was exactly what I wanted to do,” she says.

Kleinberg started at Columbia Nursing in 2020; she’ll earn her MSN this summer and plans to continue her studies in the DNP program. She was drawn to the school because of its strong global network—she envisions working in Africa again someday—but it was the Coverdell Fellowship that clinched the deal. “The scholarship takes off a lot of the pressure,” she says. “I’ve worked part-time on and off throughout the program, but my grades would have suffered if I’d had to do more.

I’m getting a great education, and I’m so happy not to have to worry constantly about how to pay for it.”

“When I first arrived,” Prenger recalls, “the cafeteria didn’t have any furniture, so the kids were eating off the floor.”

He managed to secure funding for tables and chairs.

HINDRIK PRENGER, MS ’21, DNP ’24 COVERDELL FELLOW

Hindrik Prenger, MS ’21, DNP ’24, and Katie Kleinberg, MS ’21

JÖRG ME YER

Born in Texas to a Dutch father and an American mother who worked for international nonprofits, Prenger grew up all over the planet—from Germany to the Philippines. In high school, a stint as a lifeguard awakened his interest in health care, and classes in anatomy and physiology confirmed it. But after entering Texas A&M as a premed, he realized that biology and chemistry weren’t his strong suits. “I knew the MD route wasn’t for me,” he says, “so I changed my major to international studies.”

As he continued his education, Prenger began searching for alternative ways to pursue both his medical and globe-trotting proclivities. That led him to consider the Peace Corps. When he learned that the agency favors candidates with EMT certification, he realized that as an adrenaline junkie with a fondness for rock-climbing and kayaking, that kind of training would suit him perfectly. After getting certified, he worked his way through the rest of college on emergency-room and ambulance

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REWARDING COMMITMENT crews, and (with further training in wilderness medicine) spent summers as a mountain guide in the Grand Tetons and the Alps.

The Peace Corps accepted Prenger as soon as he graduated in 2016. In the southern African nation of Lesotho, he was assigned to a boarding school for children with intellectual and physical disabilities. There, he scrambled to fill a variety of roles: managing medications, writing grants, creating a curriculum, and working with the kitchen staff to improve nutrition. “When I first arrived,” he recalls, “the cafeteria didn’t have any furniture, so the kids were eating off the floor.” He managed to secure funding for tables and chairs.

Pascale Chataigne, MS ’19, DNP ’21

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Although the days often felt longer living in a mud hut with no running water or electricity, Prenger was inspired by his charges’ joie de vivre. “It was the most humbling two years of my life,” he says, “and it was a beautiful experience.” A friend who was working for an aid group suggested a profession in which he might find similar fulfillment: nursing.

Back in the States, Prenger began applying to MDE programs. Like Kleinberg, he chose Columbia Nursing for its global network—and for the chance to join its first cohort of Coverdell Fellows. “To be in the inaugural class is kind of special,” he says. “And the financial aspect was compelling for sure.”

He, too, plans to continue on to earn his DNP. After that, he dreams of a job that will fulfill his craving for both adrenaline and meaningful service. “I’d like to combine my interests in health, humanitarian aid, and diplomacy and maybe work for an organization like Doctors Without Borders or the State Department or the WHO,” he explains. “I enjoy getting out of my comfort zone, and I’ll never stop chasing new adventures.”

PASCALE CHATAIGNE, MS ’19, DNP ’21 HRSA SCHOLAR When Chataigne was 14, her family left behind a relatively comfortable life in Haiti and immigrated to Malden, Massachusetts. “My parents sacrificed a lot so that my sister and I could have better opportunities,” she says.

Her mother, a skilled nurse, started over as a nurse’s aide; her father, an accountant, took a job as a security guard.

Despite their struggles, they put their daughters’ education ahead of everything else. And they were fiercely proud when their youngest was recruited with a scholarship to Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire.

Chataigne had hoped to become a doctor, but by the time she graduated on a premed track, she wasn’t so sure. Then she attended her best friend’s childbirth— and encountered her first midwife. “I realized that this was the model of care I wanted to pursue,” she recalls.

“Midwifery approaches the person’s whole health. The work involves advocacy for women, which is something I’ve always been passionate about. It serves the cause of Black women particularly, considering their poorer outcomes. It fits who I am.”

After entering Columbia Nursing’s MDE program in 2018, Chataigne did her global integration experience in Ethiopia, where she witnessed conditions similar to those her mother had described in Haiti. “They would schedule a procedure to repair a uterine prolapse, and have to postpone it when the electricity cut out,” she says. “The providers created innovative solutions to overcome the lack of resources and funding, such as using IV tubing for artificial rupture of membranes in labor.” She was inspired by their skills, resourcefulness, and compassion.

Chataigne continued on in Columbia’s nursemidwifery program, winning a HRSA scholarship in 2020—for her final academic year. She’d considered applying earlier but thought the program was too competitive to be a realistic option. Now she advises other students not to wait as long as she did, saying, “Don’t dismiss the possibility. You never know unless you try.”

Once she completes her DNP, she plans to fulfill her service obligation in New York; Washington, D.C.; or

Atlanta, at a practice that primarily serves women of color. Her long-term goal is to focus on health-care education in the U.S. or elsewhere—perhaps Haiti or Ethiopia. “At Columbia, I’ve had awesome preceptors, fantastic clinical experiences, and amazing friends,” she says. “Receiving a HRSA scholarship means that I’m a few steps closer to a future reality where I’ll have the financial freedom to support causes I care about here, as well as family members in Haiti.”

MICHAELA RAHIMI, MS ’19, DNP ’21 HRSA SCHOLAR As a teenager in New York’s Westchester County, Rahimi was passionate about politics. “I liked to get into debates and go to protests,” she recalls. But it was only by a circuitous route that her activism led her toward health care. After earning a BA in sociology from the State University of New York at Geneseo in 2012, she spent a few years working for nonprofit organizations—running an after-school program for high school girls and promoting youth leadership in HIV education. She also volunteered as a case manager and patient advocate for two New York City abortion-access organizations and trained with a Brooklyn-based doula service that serves low-income women of color.

Those efforts brought Rahimi into contact with “some great nurses and midwives,” she says, “who I thought were really impressive, cool people.” In addition, they heightened her awareness of the inequities in maternal outcomes for underserved populations across America. Then came the epiphany: midwifery drew together all the strands of her previous work on sexual health and reproductive agency. “Abortion access goes hand in hand with the right to parent,” she observes.

“It’s all about making choices for your body and your family. They’re two sides of the same coin.”

Rahimi applied to several nursing schools, and what sold her on Columbia was the fact that its nursemidwifery program was the longest-established one in this country. (She was also attracted to Columbia’s global integration program, which she completed in Ethiopia.) When she finishes her DNP, she plans to fulfill her service requirement in a large, urban hospital. Then she hopes to open a multidisciplinary practice of her own, with “maybe a couple midwives, a

“Receiving a HRSA scholarship means that I’m a few steps closer to a future reality where I’ll have the financial freedom to support causes I care about here, as well as family members in Haiti,” says Chataigne.

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Michaela Rahimi, MS ’19, DNP ’21

JÖRG ME YER

couple family nurse practitioners, a couple pediatric nurse practitioners.”

By reducing her postgraduate debt load, she says, the HRSA scholarship has given her some “breathing space” to achieve that ambition. “I applied twice before I was accepted,” Rahimi says. The first time, I turned out not to be eligible. The second time, I was rejected. I almost didn’t apply the third time. But I’m really glad I did.”

Elizabeth Gary, MS ’15

ELIZABETH GARY, MS ’15 HRSA ALUMNA Growing up in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, Gary’s greatest inspiration was her mother—a single parent of six who worked as a home health aide while struggling with addiction. “We had to live with my grandmother for a while, but she eventually overcame her drug habit and regained custody,” Gary recalls.

“Watching her showed me what strength is.”

It also spurred her to find a way to help others. As a high school student, Gary volunteered at a nearby medical

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center. When she rotated to the labor and delivery unit, she had an “ah-ha” moment. “This is where all the happiness in the hospital seemed to be. I felt like I belonged there.”

Intending to become an ob-gyn, Gary scored a scholarship to Bowdoin College in Maine. She was the first person in her family to go to a four-year college. But as a premed double-majoring in English literature, she felt crushed by stress, and her grades suffered. In her junior year, Gary shifted her sights to midwifery. After graduating in 2011, she applied to nursing school at the University of Maine— only to be rejected due to her lackluster transcript.

Refusing to accept defeat, Gary returned to New York and met with an admissions representative at Columbia Nursing. “I explained my whole life story to him, trying to make sure I truly had a chance of getting into the MDE program,” she says. “I was blown away by how supportive and compassionate he was.” When she received her acceptance letter, she adds, “I was like, ‘I can’t believe this. My life is turning around.’”

But Gary was also stunned by the cost of her tuition, which was covered only partially by financial aid; she

had to take out sizable loans to cover the difference, as well as her living expenses. She applied for a HRSA scholarship once she’d completed her BSN—and made the cut. While studying for her MSN in nursemidwifery, Gary acted as a student ambassador for the program, encouraging other applicants from lowincome backgrounds to follow in her footsteps.

After earning her degree, Gary spent three years at Mount Sinai Hospital’s women’s health clinic, providing care to low-income patients. In 2018, she moved with her husband to Chinle, Arizona, where she works at a clinic that serves women from the local Navajo Reservation. She gave birth to her own son at the facility a few months after arriving.

“The women here face issues like those in the developing world,” Gary says. “Most of them live in substandard housing, often without electricity, running water, or any heat supply other than a wood stove.

There’s a lot of domestic violence, substance abuse, depression, and suicide, as well as comorbidities like diabetes and high blood pressure.” COVID-19 has hit the community particularly hard.

Yet Gary feels invigorated by the challenges of her work and by the resilience of her patients and her colleagues.

“This is what I’ve always wanted to do,” she says. “Wherever I go, I want to be serving people in the greatest need.”

GRACE KELLEY, MS ’18 HRSA ALUMNA Kelley, too, was inspired by her mother’s struggles and triumphs. Her mom had become pregnant as a teenager and given birth to a baby boy; with family support, she went on to college, married, and had three more kids (of which Kelley was the first). She also became a prominent agricultural engineer, spending much of her time away on business. Kelley’s father served as a stayat-home parent, learning to cook dinner and braid his daughters’ hair. “Our parents encouraged us to question the way things are and to be open-minded about things like gender roles,” Kelley recalls. “I’ve always been interested in why some people aren’t treated fairly and how we can try to change that.”

Drawn to health care as an arena for activism, Kelley enrolled at Kalamazoo College as a premed. But after finding that she preferred other subjects to calculus and chemistry, she switched her major to human development and social relations. Between classes, she threw herself into community organizing and worked as an outdoor education leader.

After graduation, she took a certification course as a wilderness first responder, which reignited her interest in

medicine. But what really changed the course of her life was a chance encounter while working as a waitress at the local Olive Garden. “One of my customers happened to be the CEO of a hospital,” she explains.

“We struck up a conversation, and I mentioned the things I was thinking about. He was like, ‘Have you ever heard of a nurse practitioner? You sound like one to me.’” Following his advice, Kelley pursued CNA training and found a job at a nursing home. She loved the work and decided to become an NP. Kelley chose Columbia Nursing for its accelerated MDE program, its global offerings, and its diverse patient population and student body. “I felt so privileged to be there that I wanted to take advantage of all the experiences it offered,” she says. She represented the school’s students in the University Senate and was ultimately elected co-chair of that body’s student affairs committee. For her global integration experience, she went to Ghana, where she assisted midwives at a rural hospital and did research on toileting hygiene in the country’s schools—which typically lack running water.

She won the HRSA scholarship during her second year at Columbia. Then, during her final year, tragedy struck: her younger brother died of an accidental opioid overdose. Kelley was devastated, but she resolved to honor his memory through her work. “If I can prevent one person from having that outcome,” she says, “that’s doing right by him.”

After earning her master’s, Kelley signed on with a primary care clinic run by Packard Health, a not-for-profit Federally Qualified Health Center in Ypsilanti, Michigan, an underserved community not far from her childhood home. “From the first day,” she recalls, “it became clear that my bread and butter would be mental health and addiction.”

In addition to treating patients, she works to improve educational support for Packard’s advanced practice providers, hosting monthly meetings to discuss topic reviews, guideline updates, and other material aimed at improving quality of care.

This career choice, she notes, would have been impossible without the HRSA program. “There’s a discrepancy between studying health inequities at a place like Columbia Nursing and being able to work at a not-for-profit health-care entity after you graduate,” Kelley says. “If I was under pressure to pay back student loans, I might have said, ‘I wish I could work there, but I just can’t.’ Not having that obstacle is huge.” 

M Y L E S T Y RE R- VA S S E L L

REWARDING COMMITMENT

Grace Kelley, MS ’18

Kelley chose Columbia Nursing for its accelerated MDE program, its global offerings, and its diverse patient population and student body.

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Selected Faculty

Publications Our faculty’s research continues to create new knowledge that advances health care. Listed are selected articles published by leading peer-reviewed publications.

Mansi Agarwal, Leah Estrada ’20, Komal Murali, and Patricia Stone were among the

authors of “The Role of Regional and State Initiatives in Nursing Home Advance Care Planning Policies,” published in American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care.

Mansi Agarwal, Jiyoun Song ’17, and Patricia Stone were among the authors of “Impact

of the Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) Program Maturity Status on the Nursing Home Resident’s Place of Death,” published in American Journal of Hospital and Palliative Care.

Mental Illness in Supportive Housing,” published in Community Mental Health Journal.

Walter Bockting was among the authors

of “Stigmatization, Resilience, and Mental Health Among a Diverse Community Sample of Transgender and Gender Nonbinary Individuals in the U.S.,” published in Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Jessica Brooks ’03 was among the authors

of “Certified Peer Specialists’ Perspective of the Barriers and Facilitators to Mobile Health Engagement,” published in Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science.

Eileen Carter ’14, Maureen George, Jingjing Shang, and Patricia Stone were among the authors of

“Unmet Informational Needs Among Nursing Home Residents Receiving Antibiotics: A Qualitative Study,” published in Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.

Kenrick Cato ’14 was among the authors of

“Engagement Among Psychiatric Nurses: Is It Different? How and Why?” published in Nursing Management.

Kenrick Cato ’14 and Sarah Collins Rossetti ’09 were among the authors of “Transforming Clinical Data into Wisdom: Artificial Intelligence Implications for Nurse Leaders,” published in Nursing Management.

Ashley Chastain, Sabrina Mangal ’20, Patricia Stone, and Jingjing Shang were among the

authors of “Home Health Staff Perspectives on Infection Prevention and Control: Implications for Coronavirus Disease 2019,” published in Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.

Mansi Agarwal and Patricia Stone were among

the authors of “Trends in Antibiotics Use Among Long-Term US Nursing-Home Residents,” published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.

Gregory Alexander was among the authors

of “An Evaluation of Telehealth Expansion in U.S. Nursing Homes,” published in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association; “Innovation Driving Care Systems Capability: Final Report,” published by Aged Care Industry Information Technology Council (Australia); “Leveraging Technology to Improve Care of Older Adults,” published in Journal of Gerontological Nursing; “Qualitative Validation of the Nursing Home IT Maturity Staging Model,” published in Journal of Gerontological Nursing; and “Systematic Review of Program Evaluation in Baccalaureate Nursing Programs,” published in Journal of Professional Nursing.

Lauren Bochicchio was among the authors

of “‘We Die 25 Years Sooner’: Addressing Physical Health Among Persons with Serious

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Columbia Nursing Spring 2021

Jean-Marie Bruzzese, Maureen George, and Jianfang Liu were among the authors of

“The Development and Preliminary Impact of CAMP Air: A Web-based Asthma Intervention to Improve Asthma Among Adolescents,” published in Patient Education and Counseling.

Billy Caceres, Kathleen Hickey, Suzanne Bakken, Theresa Koleck, and Haomiao Jia

were among the authors of “Mobile Electrocardiogram Monitoring and Health-Related Quality of Life in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation: Findings from the iPhone Helping Evaluate Atrial Fibrillation Rhythm Through Technology (iHEART) Study,” published in Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing.

Elizabeth Corwin was among the authors of “The Metabolomic Underpinnings of Symptom Burden in Patients with Multiple Chronic Conditions,” published in Biological Research for Nursing, and “Association Between Micronutrients and Maternal Leukocyte Telomere Length in Early Pregnancy in Rwanda,” published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth.

Jennifer Dohrn ’05 was among the authors of “The Health-Related Quality of Life of Syrian Refugee Women in Their Reproductive Age,” published in Peer J-The Journal of Life and Environmental Sciences, and “Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices of Syrian Refugee Mothers Towards Sexually Transmitted Infections,” published in International Journal of Women’s Health.

Eileen Carter ’14 was among the authors of

“Design and Study Protocol for a Cluster Randomized Trial of a Multi-Faceted Implementation Strategy to Increase the Uptake of the USPSTF Hypertension Screening Recommendations: The EMBRACE Study,” published in Implementation Science.

Leah Estrada ’20, Mansi Agarwal, and Patricia Stone were the authors of “Racial/

Ethnic Disparities in Nursing Home Endof-Life Care: A Systematic Review,” published in Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.

Leah Estrada ’20, Mary Tresgallo ’08, Patricia Stone, and Mansi Agarwal were among the

authors of “Palliative Care and Infection Management in Nursing Homes: A Nationwide Survey,” published in Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.

published in Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Certification: Review Guide Primary Care.

City, NY USA,” published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

Rita Marie John ’05 and Laura Kelly were the

Megan Marx ’20 was the author of “EvidenceBased Guidance for Self-Administration of Injectable Contraception,” published in Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health.

authors of Chapter 4, “Mental Health,” published in Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Certification: Review Guide Primary Care.

Maureen George was among the authors

of “Development and Validation of a Novel Informational Booklet for Pediatric Long-Term Ventilation Decision Support,” published in Pediatric Pulmonology, and “Inhaled Corticosteroid Beliefs, Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Children Presenting to the Emergency Department for Asthma,” published in Journal of Asthma.

Maureen George, Jean-Marie Bruzzese, Haomiao Jia, and Allison Norful ’17 were among the authors

of “Group-Randomized Trial of Tailored Brief Shared Decision-Making to Improve Asthma Control in Urban Black Adults,” published in Journal of Advanced Nursing.

Amanda Hessels was among the authors of

“Epidemiology and Impact of HealthcareAssociated Infections in Trauma Patients: A National Data Analysis,” published in Surgical Infections.

Amanda Hessels, Bevin Cohen ’17, and Elaine Larson were the authors of “Patient Safety

Culture Survey in Pediatric Complex Care Settings: A Factor Analysis,” published in Journal of Patient Safety.

Judy Honig was among the authors of

“Exploration of Advanced Practice Nurses’ Competencies Necessary for Achievement of Universal Health Coverage in Jordan,” published in Nursing Forum.

Theresa Koleck, Suzanne Bakken, Shazia Mitha ’18, Maureen George, Arlene Smaldone ’03, and Maxim Topaz were among the authors of

“Identifying Symptom Information in Clinical Notes Using Natural Language Processing,” published in Nursing Research.

of “Factors Associated with Dissatisfaction in Medical Care Quality Among Older Medicare Beneficiaries Suffering from Mental Illness,” published in Journal of Aging and Social Policy.

Ariana Komaroff ’04 was the co-author of

Komal Murali was among the authors of “An

“Implementing a Clinical Protocol Using Breastfeeding to Mitigate Vaccination Pain in Infants,” published in Journal of Pediatric Nursing.

Adapted Conceptual Model Integrating Palliative Care in Serious Illness and Multiple Chronic Conditions,” published in American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

Elaine Larson was among the authors of “Active Surveillance for Acute Respiratory Infections among Pediatric Long-Term Care Facility Staff,” published in American Journal of Infection Control, and “Identifying Global Research Gaps to Mitigate Antimicrobial Resistance: A Scoping Review,” published in American Journal of Infection Control.

Allison Norful ’17 was among the authors of

Elaine Larson, Jiyoun Song ’17, and Jingjing Shang were among the authors of “Observa-

tion of Hand Hygiene Practices in Home Health Care,” published in Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.

Jianfang Liu was among the authors of “Trends in Comorbidities among HIVInfected Hospital Admissions in New York City from 2006-2016,” published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Jianfang Liu, Bevin Cohen ’17, and Elaine Larson

Haomiao Jia and Rebecca Schnall ’09 were

among the authors of “Protocol of the Randomized Control Trial: The WiseApp Trial for Improving Health Outcomes in PLWH (WiseApp),” published in BMC Public Health.

Rita Marie John ’05 was the author of Chapter

17, “Multisystem and Genetic Disorders,”

Jacqueline Merrill ’06 was among the authors

were among the authors of “Novel Strategies for Predicting Healthcare-Associated Infections at Admission: Implications for Nursing Care,” published in Nursing Research.

“The Influence of Empowered Work Environments on the Psychological Experiences of Nursing Assistants during COVID-19: A Qualitative Study,” published in BMC Nursing, and “Nursing Perspectives on Care Delivery During the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Study,” published in International Journal of Nursing Studies Advances.

Allison Norful ’17, Ani Bilazarian, and Maureen George were among the authors of

“Real-World Drivers behind Communication, Medication Adherence, and Shared Decision Making in Minority Adults with Asthma,” published in Journal of Primary Care and Community Health.

Allison Norful ’17 and Michelle Odlum were among the authors of “The Powder Keg: Lessons Learned about Clinical Staff Preparedness during the Early Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” published in American Journal of Infection Control.

Allison Norful ’17 and Lusine Poghosyan were

Jianfang Liu and Elaine Larson were among

the authors of “Length of Hospitalization and Hospital Readmissions Among Patients with Substance Use Disorders in New York

among the authors of “Organizational Facilitators and Barriers to Optimal APRN Practice: An Integrative Review,” published in Health Care Management Review.

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Columbia Nursing 27

Selected Faculty Publications Michelle Odlum was among the authors

of “Strategies for Increasing Impact, Engagement, and Accessibility in HIV Prevention Programs: Suggestions from Women in Urban High HIV Burden Counties in the Eastern United States,” published in BMC Public Health.

Lusine Poghosyan was among the authors

of “Language Equivalence of the Modified Falls Efficacy Scale (MFES) Among Englishand Spanish-Speaking Older Adults: Rasch Analysis,” published in BMC Geriatrics, and “Surveying Primary Care Nurse Practitioners: An Overview of National Sampling Frames,” published in Policy, Politics, and Nursing Practice.

Jingjing Shang was among the authors of “Home Care Nurses’ Identification of Patients at Risk of Infection and Their Risk Mitigation Strategies: A Qualitative Interview Study,” published in International Journal of Nursing Studies, and “Implications of a US Study on Infection Prevention and Control in Community Settings in the UK,” published in British Journal of Community Nursing.

Jingjing Shang, Ashley Chastain, Uduwanage Gayani Perera, Caroline Fu, and Patricia Stone

were among the authors of “COVID-19 Preparedness in US Home Health Care Agencies,” published in Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.

Arlene Smaldone ’03 was among the authors

Lusine Poghosyan and Jianfang Liu were

among the authors of “Organizational Support for Nurse Practitioners in Primary Care and Workforce Outcomes,” published in Nursing Research.

of “Perceived Parental Monitoring: A Systematic Review of Monitoring Instruments,” published in Journal of Nursing Measurement.

“Symptoms and Management Strategies for Older Chinese Adults with End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) and Other Chronic Conditions,” published in Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.

Jacquelyn Taylor was among the authors

of “African American Mothers’ Attitudes Towards Genetic Testing in the InterGEN Study,” published in Journal of Community Genetics, and “High Blood Pressure in Pregnancy, DNA Methylation, and Later Blood Pressure in African American Women Enrolled in the InterGEN Study,” published in Birth Issues in Perinatal Care.

Maxim Topaz, Teresa Koleck, Arlene Smaldone ’03, and Suzanne Bakken were among the

authors of “Nursing Documentation of Symptoms Is Associated with Higher Risk of Emergency Department Visits and Hospitalizations in Homecare Patients,” published in Nursing Outlook.

Jiyoun Song ’20 and Jingjing Shang were among Nancy Reame was the author of “Estetrol for Menopause Symptoms: The Cinderella of Estrogens or Just Another Fairy Tale?” published in Menopause, and the section titled “Toxic Shock Syndrome and Tampons: The Birth of a Movement and a Research ‘Vagenda,’” published in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies.

Amelia Schlak was among the authors of

“System-Level Improvements in Work Environments Lead to Lower Nurse Burnout and Higher Patient Satisfaction,” published in Journal of Nursing Care Quality.

Rebecca Schnall ’09 was among the authors

of “Awareness, Willingness, and Perceived Efficacy of Pre-exposure Prophylaxis among Adolescent Sexual Minority Males,” published in Journal of Urban Health.

Rebecca Schnall ’09, Haomiao Jia, and Suzanne Bakken were among the authors of

“Efficacy, Use, and Usability of the VIPHANA App for Symptom Self-Management in PLWH with HANA Conditions,” published in AIDS and Behavior.

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Columbia Nursing Spring 2021

the authors of “’A Catalyst for Action’: Factors for Implementing Clinical Risk Prediction Models of Infection in Home Care Settings,” published in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Jiyoun Song ’20 and Patricia Stone were among the authors of “Are We Getting What We Really Want? A Systematic Review of Concordance between Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) Documentation and Subsequent Care Delivered at End-of-Life,” published in American Journal of Hospital and Palliative Medicine.

Patricia Stone was among the authors of “Opportunities for Nursing Science to Advance Patient Care in the Time of COVID-19: A Palliative Care Perspective,” published in Journal of Nursing Scholarship, and the author of a commentary, “Value-Based Incentive Programs and Health Disparities,” published in JAMA Network Open.

Carolyn Sun, Jingjing Shang, and Patricia Stone were among the authors of

Maxim Topaz, Maryam Zolnoori, and Kenrick Cato ’14 were among the authors

of “Home Healthcare Clinical Notes Predict Patient Hospitalization and Emergency Department Visits,” published in Nursing Research.

Mary Tresgallo ’08, Patricia Stone, and Mansi Agarwal were among the authors of

“Palliative Care and Infection Management in Nursing Homes: A Nationwide Survey (RP526),” published in Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.

Cindy Veldhuis was among the authors of

“Associations Between Media Exposure and Mental Distress Among U.S. Adults at the Beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” published in American Journal of Preventive Medicine; “Mental Distress During the COVID-19 Pandemic Among US Adults Without a Pre-Existing Mental Health Condition: Findings from American Trend Panel Survey,” published in Preventive Medicine; and “Mental Distress in the United States at the Beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” published in American Journal of Public Health.

From the Alumni Association President Dear Columbia Nursing Alumni,

G

reetings on behalf of the Alumni Association. I am so proud to be part of our profession as we reflect on the challenges of 2020 and 2021 and the important role that nursing plays on many fronts.

Critical thinking, perseverance, adaptability, reliance on evidencebased practice, and compassion are all characteristics you possess that have helped us tackle this pandemic, bridge the gap between inequalities in our population and health care, and honor the true meaning of being a nurse.

It is moving to read the “Nurse Hero” stories that continue to be shared on the school’s social media and in the monthly newsletter. Over the last year, all events have been online, offering new ways to connect with alumni and faculty across the country that we hope you find inspiring and interesting.

We have been able to see new faces and make new bonds that have expanded our Columbia Nursing alumni community. Our “Virtually Speaking” webinar series launched last summer and it has included a presentation on a unique collaboration between Columbia Nursing and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, a lecture on Florence Nightingale by Anne Marie Rafferty, a panel featuring alumni on the COVID frontlines, and updates about Columbia Nursing during the pandemic. If you were not able to attend one of the events, the recordings can be found on the school’s YouTube channel.

Since virtual programming has become the norm during COVID, we have worked hard to leverage broader access for alumni to events offered by both the school and Columbia University. A few examples of the programs we were excited to offer include access to the third annual Innovations in Simulation Summit, which addressed systemic racism in health care; Columbia Global Center panels like one that featured nurses in both Wuhan, China, and Columbia Nursing students in New York City; and the new anti-racism lecture series hosted by the school’s Center for Research on People of Color.

The Alumni Association encourages you to share your experiences, knowledge, and passion for nursing by participating in volunteer activities and joining us at events. If you would like to become more engaged with the school, have an idea for a program, want to share professional news, or wish to update your contact information, please reach out to our alumni office at sonalumni@cumc.columbia.edu or 212-305-3851.

On behalf of the Alumni Association, I hope you have a wonderful summer, and I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you at future events—both online and in person.

2020-2021 Alumni Association Board of Directors Laura Ardizzone, DNP ’10 Paige Mackey Bellinger, MS ’12 Daniel Billings, DNP ’18 Kevin Browne, MS ’92 Kenrick Cato, PhD, ’14 Patricia DeAngelis Fife, BS ’68 Mollie Finkel, MS ’12 Christa Simpson Heinsler, BS ’76 Kevin Hook, BS ’98 Denise Houghton, BS ’78 Matthew Jenison, MS ’12 Rosalind Kendellen, MS ’74 Hilda Haynes Lewis, MS ’99 Wanda Montalvo, PhD ’15 Kathleen McCooe Nilles, BS ’89 Rose Rodriguez, MS ’06 Marjorie Salas Weis, DNP ’17 Connie Yip, MS ’13

Warm Regards,

Laura Ardizzone, DNP ’10 President, Columbia Nursing Alumni Association Director, Nurse Anesthesia Services, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Spring 2021

Columbia Nursing 29

2020–2021

Class Notes

1950s

1970s

Dorothy Simpson Dorion ’57BS published a

Sharon Robinson ’76MS received the 2020 Grate-

book with co-author Celeste Callahan titled Beyond Triathlon. She hopes it will inspire others to succeed in sports and in life, especially women. The book mentions Dorothy’s nursing career at Columbia Nursing.

Dorothy started running in the early 1970s, took up triathlons in the early 1980s, and formerly chaired the International Triathlon Union Women’s Committee.

ful American Book Prize for her memoir Child of the Dream. The prize was established to honor authors who write illustrated works for children that are focused on historical American events and personalities, and to encourage them and their publishers to produce more accurate books about America’s past.

Carol Savidge Helmstadter ’56BS published the book Beyond Nightingale: Nursing on the Crimean War Battlefields, an exploration of the inception of modern nursing from a transnational perspective.

1960s Linda Moyse Brookes ’68BS, who retired in 2016 after 41 years as the director of infection prevention at a small New England Hospital, has continued working and helping to administer COVID-19 vaccines.

Mary Masterson Germain ’64BS wrote a chapter, “Culture as a Variable in Practice,” for the fifth edition of the graduate nursing textbook Advanced Nursing Practice: Essentials for Role Development.

Janet Hine Widell ’67BS retired after a long

career in community health and teaching in both ADN and BSN programs. She continues to offer information and resource connections as the parish nurse in her Presbyterian congregation.

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Columbia Nursing Spring 2021

1980s Susan Lewis Cruz ’82MS continues to work

part time as a nurse practitioner at Workplace Health in Waterville, Maine.

Martha Fuller ’83MS obtained her PhD after years of working clinically. For the past three years she has been teaching in the nurse practitioner program at the Hahn School of Nursing and Health Science at the University of San Diego.

Janet Ready ’81BS, chief operating officer at

St. Joseph’s Health, was interviewed by the Syracuse Post-Standard in an article titled “Janet Ready on Leadership: Learn How to Really Listen, Be Kind and Authentic, Find a Mentor.”

Phyllis Roberts Temple ’85BS retired from her

family nurse practitioner practice at a community college health clinic. She is enjoying retirement but is using the time she has during the pandemic to earn the waiver required to prescribe buprenorphine and preparing to enter part-time practice in behavioral health and recovery post-vaccination.

Dian Traisci-Marandola ’81MS was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.

Anna Kienski Woloski-Wruble ’82BS holds an academic tenured appointment of senior lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine at Hebrew University; is a senior faculty member of the Henrietta Szold Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Nursing; and is a midwife in Jerusalem. She has a nurse-based faculty practice clinic in sexual health that is part of the Russell and Patricia Fleischman Center for Women’s Health and part of a multidisciplinary team at the Center for Sexual Health at Hadassah Hospital Mt. Scopus. She also has a private practice in a multidisciplinary clinic in Jerusalem where she sees individuals and couples with intimacy and sexuality issues. She has received numerous awards, including the Faculty of Medicine Award for excellence in research from Hebrew University and the Rebecca Bergman Award for Creativity in Nursing Education from Tel Aviv University. She has done groundbreaking outreach work internationally with the orthodox/ ultraorthodox community concerning sexual awareness and relationship development. She has also been a partner in a pioneering initiative for the development and implementation of a comprehensive sexuality curriculum for Jewish elementary and high schools. Woloski-Wruble returned recently from a sabbatical where she collaborated with the nursing division of the Israeli Ministry of Health in their research, development, and innovation department.

1990s Kevin Daugherty Hook ’98BS has returned to

clinical practice as the director of community-

based palliative care after nearly 15 years in a variety of leadership roles at the local and national levels. He also finished his DNP and is now adjunct faculty at UPenn School of Nursing. Kevin is excited for these great transitions at this point in his career and to return to the passions that drew him to nursing.

Rebecca Schnall ’09PhD was honored with the 2020 Friends of the National Institute of Nursing Research Welch/Woerner PathPaver Award at the FNINR NightinGala, and paid tribute to Mary Dickey Lindsay ’45 in her acceptance speech.

Victoria Tiase ‘06MS was inducted as a fellow

Beth Oliver ’91MS was appointed to the role

of senior vice president and chief nurse executive at Mount Sinai Health Systems.

Frank Russo ’92BS ’95MS completed a three-

year program in classical homeopathy and was awarded a diploma from the International Academy of Classical Homeopathy in Alonnisos, Greece. He is now certified in classical homeopathy.

2000s Katherine Cardoni Brewer ’02BS graduated

of the American Academy of Nursing.

Tip Lu Tilton ’06BS was asked to work in a COVID-19 vaccination clinic and is proud to be involved in this historical moment and to be part of the solution.

2010s Roxana Bustamante ’15BS ’17MS is working as

a nurse practitioner on the hospital service at Yale New Haven Hospital, where she precepts students and assists in mentoring nurses on a COVID-19 unit.

Kenrick Cato ’08BS ’14PhD was chosen

Jennifer Dohrn ’85MS ’05DNP was selected as one of the Women in Global Health’s 100+ Outstanding Women Nurses and Midwives.

to co-chair the American Medical Infor­ matics Association’s virtual Clinical Informatics Conference.

Patricia Dykes ’04PhD was named a 2020 Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics.

Lorie Goshin ‘10PhD was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.

on pediatric laboratories with most chapters being authored or co-authored by Columbia faculty, former students, or former preceptors.

Anita Nirenberg ’96MS ’09PhD was appointed

to the executive board of the Children’s Brain Tumor Network. This multinational member organization uses big data to characterize children’s brain tumors.

Suzanne Ohlman ’08BS, a heart failure nurse at Craig Cardiovascular Center, is now a contributing writer at Texas Monthly.

Elisheva Schachter Rosner ’05BS published an

article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology titled “Adverse Effects of Prolonged Mask Use among Healthcare Professionals during COVID-19.”

Marie Mounier ’19MS is grateful to start her first nursing job as a COVID-19 vaccination nurse.Ann-Margaret Navarra ’92MS ’11PhD was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She also received an NIH grant to expand research on improving HIV medication adherence among diverse young people.

Brittany Richards ’17MS ’18DNP received the Caribbean Life Impact Award that recognizes the achievements and contributions of outstanding individuals of Caribbean background who have created the most impact in their respective career fields. Brittany is an assistant professor at New York City College of Technology.

Annie Rohan ’91MS ’13PhD was inducted as a

with her PhD in nursing in May 2020.

Rita Marie John ’05DNP is writing a textbook

mental health and wellness collective that delivers evidence-based care using a wholeperson approach.

Philip Gyura ’14MS ’16DNP and Ashley Gyura ’16MS ’17DNP are now based in Minne-

apolis. Philip is the chief medical officer of YourPath, a management services organization that will house groups with the aim of increasing longitudinal low threshold care for people who are struggling with substance use. They aim to engage people in community spaces and through telehealth to help build relationships, trust, and care plans. Ashley is a PNP specializing in pediatric infectious diseases at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota.

Nargus Harounzadeh ’14BS ’16MS ’18DNP was

the alumni speaker at Columbia Nursing’s White Coat Ceremony in January. Nargus is associate director of mental health/ psychiatry at NYC Health + Hospitals on Rikers Island. She also is founder and medical director of Attune Therapy, a

fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.

She was also appointed the associate dean of research and sponsored programs and the director of the Doctor of Nursing Practice Program at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University College of Nursing.

Theresa Salerno ’12MS is now a medical science liaison, focusing on gene therapy, at bluebird bio.

Amy Rose Taylor ’14BS ’16MS was promoted

to the position of director of clinical operations for UnitedHealth Group/Optum, managing the house calls program in the Northeast, all while welcoming her sixth child, Luisa. She completed her inaugural Leader Fellowship with the Gerontological Advanced Practice Nurses Association (GAPNA) and is currently serving the organization as their communications chair. In addition, she remains active with SONSIEL (Society of Nurse Scientists Innovators Entrepreneurs and Leaders), an organization that she helped found with Paul Coyne ’13 ’15 ’16, and serves as their UN Committee Representative as well as judge for several hackathons in conjunction with Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson.

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Columbia Nursing 31

Class Notes and In Memoriam

Her second book, The Rebel Nurse Handbook, was published in February 2020 and was recently awarded third place under the Professional Issues category for the Book of the Year Award by the American Journal of Nursing.

Po-Yin Yen ’10PhD was inducted as a fellow

of the American Academy of Nursing.

2020s

Margaret Murphy ’20MS started her first job as

a nurse on the cardiothoracic floor.

Caitlin de Cristo ’20MS began her nursing

career as a staff nurse on an acute surgical unit at NYU Langone.

Anthony Pho ’20PhD is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Richard Dorritie ’20PhD is now a clinical assis-

Alice Schreiber ’17MS ’20DNP started her first job as a certified nurse midwife at Sarasota OB/GYN Associates in Florida.

tant professor at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing.

2020-2021

In Memoriam FACULTY Kathleen Hickey, EdD, Assistant Professor

of Nursing

ALUMNI 1940s Mary Shaweker Crull ’43 Miriam Jordan ’43 Anita Siegel Epstein ’46 Mary Hope Mason ’46 Martha Rosman McDowell May ’46 Nancy Sprunt Mathes ’48 Helen Meyer Schweinsberg ’48

Martha Haber DeLano ’49 Nancy Shattuck DuPeza ’49

1950s Jeanne Fistere ’50 Louise Danek ’52 Marilyn Larson Vestigo ’52 Mary Newton Western ’52 Joyce Miller Sammis ’53 Colette Brando Basta ’54 Marguerite Temple Martin ’55 Carolyn Curtis Hillegas ’57 Margaret Little Psarakis ’57 Sheila Flynn Blank ’59

Mary Dickey Lindsay ’45

Columbia University School of Nursing celebrates the life and mourns the passing of Mary Dickey Lindsay ’45. A longtime Board of Visitors member, she was a strong advocate of the school and advanced practice nursing. Named the school’s “Alumna of the Century” in 2003 and recipient of the University’s Witten Award for Transformational Volunteer Leadership in 2015, Mary Lindsay helped generations of students prepare for nursing careers. Her legacy lives on through scholarships, a professorship, and the skills lab named for her and her late daughter, Louise Lindsay Read ’74. Her friendship, strategic thinking, and enthusiasm will be missed, and we offer condolences to the entire Lindsay family.

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Columbia Nursing Spring 2021

1960s Vivian Tarbell Elbert ’60 Joan Daly Feeney ’60 Joan Luhrs Berecz ’61 Elizabeth Miller Garrettson ’61 Anne Crowder ’62 Julie Jordan Drennan ’62 Josepha Schretlen Eyre ’62 Priscilla Jenkins ’62 Margaret Mabrey Craig ’64 Jaquey Brown Yocum ’64 Sally Ruffner Leiter ’66 Margaret Young ’68

1970s Marilyn Leistner ’70 Pamela Outsh Schwab ’70 Frances Karovic ’71 Nancy Scannell Moncton ’72 Jonathan Holderman ’73 Catherine McCarthy Andreoli ’75 Susan Blizzard-Halleran ’76 Robin Reilly Gessinger ’77

1980s Clidean Acosta ’87

1990s Wayne Landau ’95

Make your gift to the nd Annual Fu today!

SUPPORT THE NEXT GENERATION OF COLUMBIA NURSES Dean’s Discretionary Fund

Scholarship Fund

Global Fellows Fund

To make your tax-deductible contribution, please consider making your gift online, as processing of checks may be delayed. Kindly visit nursing.columbia.edu/annual-fund.

For more information, contact Janine Handfus, associate director, Annual Fund, at 212-305-0079 or jh2526@cumc.columbia.edu.

560 West 168th Street, MC 6 New York, NY 10032

THE

IMPACT

OF

SCHOLARSHIP SUPPORT “ Receiving financial aid while studying at Columbia Nursing meant my success was a shared success. A powerhouse combination of scholarship donors comprised of alumni and friends supported me as a student. I am now a dual mother-baby and NICU nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, where I have the opportunity to work with a population of cute things in small packages. I am deeply grateful for my Columbia Nursing education.”

For more information about giving to Columbia Nursing, visit nursing.columbia.edu/giving or contact Janice Grady, executive director, Development and Alumni Relations, at 212-305-1088 or jar2272@cumc.columbia.edu.

JÖRG ME YER

— Ithamar Turenne, MS’18