Welcome to the New Academic Year

A Message from Dean Meleis

Dear Members of the School of Nursing Community:

Welcome to the 2009-2010 Academic Year!  I hope your summer was productive, rejuvenating, and that you accomplished most of what you wished.  While summers provide the opportunity to reconnect with family and friends, now is the time to reconnect with colleagues and students.  At Penn Nursing, we continue our strategic goal to create a healthy environment, both within and outside our walls.

Let me suggest that you make it a point to meet and greet and ask each other about your summer goals and accomplishments.  Engage your colleagues with in-depth conversations about their activities over the summer months. I guarantee that you will be amazed at the breadth of our School’s engagements. Take, for instance:

• Two relatively new and very different mentorship programs that got local high school students interested in nursing as an educational option – Jane Barnsteiner and Kathy McCauley.
• A cross-schools policy leadership program in Washington, DC – Mary Lou de Leon Siantz
• Two revised and successful study abroad programs in Thailand and Botswana – Marjorie Muecke
• Penn Nursing highly visible, present, and leading at the International Council of Nursing Congress in Durbin, South Africa - Linda Aiken, Jane Barnsteiner, and Barbra Mann Wall.
• A program to enhance productivity in nursing science in China - Linda Aiken and Jianghong Lui.
• A program introducing advanced practice nursing and evaluation of outcomes in Chanai, India – Eileen Sullivan-Marx.
• The arrival of 87 diverse second degree students from 21 states and from 65 Universities, who hold degrees ranging from the BS and MS to Pharmacy and among them, they speak about six different languages – Kathy McCauley, Christina Clark, and Carol Ladden.
• Translating nursing research to pending legislation by Mary Naylor via her testimony in Washington on the healthy transitions of patients.

In addition, as we begin the new academic year, we have many firsts.  We have on board our very first Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, or PIK, Dr. Karen Glantz (room 436B), whom we share with the School of Medicine.  We also welcomed both Dr. Pam Cacchione, Associate Professor of Geropsychiatric Nursing-CE (room 410) who has a joint appointment with the LIFE program as well as Dr. Linda Hatfield, Assistant Professor of Evidence-Based Practice CE (room 321), who joined Pennsylvania Hospital (our first joint appointment with Pennsylvania Hospital). We are also honored this year to be hosting a new and very distinguished Visiting Professor, Dr. Patricia Benner (room 418). Please make sure you personally welcome each and every one of these new additions to our School; learn about their rich backgrounds and their goals for our programs.

As you are well aware, these are by no means the only things going on in our School, as you will hear at the Dean’s State of the School address on September 23, 3:30-5:00 pm in the Ann L. Roy Auditorium where it has been our practice to review our accomplishments and re-envision what is ahead.  If I must capture the year in a few words I would say it is about a lot of “R”s – research, reflecting, reviewing, revising, recruiting, and realigning our goals with infrastructures and national dialogues. 

Welcome Back! I look forward to another revitalizing, rewarding, and reaffirming year with each and every one of you.

Regards,

Dean Afaf I. Meleis, PhD, DrPS(hon), FAAN