The NewCourtland Center for Transitions and Health

Meet our multidisciplinary membership!

Mary D. Naylor, PhD, RN

Dr. Naylor is the Marian S. Ware Professor in Gerontology and Director of the NewCourtland Center for Transitions and Health. Since 1990, Dr. Naylor has led an interdisciplinary program of research designed to improve the quality of care, decrease unnecessary hospitalizations and reduce health care costs for vulnerable community-based elders. To date, Dr. Naylor and her research team have completed three National Institutes of Health funded randomized clinical trials testing the Advanced Practice Nurse Transitional Care Model, an innovative approach to addressing the needs of high risk chronically-ill elders and their caregivers. With the support of The Commonwealth Fund, the Jacob & Valeria Langeloth Foundation and the John A. Hartford Foundation, this research team has recently partnered with a major insurance organization and health care organization to promote widespread adoption of this proven model of care coordination. An ongoing clinical trial funded by the Marian S. Ware Alzheimer Program and the National Institute on Aging has expanded testing of this model of care with hospitalized cognitively impaired elders and their caregivers. Additionally, Dr. Naylor and colleagues have recently launched a study funded by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute for Nursing Research that will examine over time the natural history of changes in health and quality of life among elders newly admitted to long term care settings or services.  

In recognition of her research and leadership, Dr. Naylor has received numerous awards. In 2004, she was the first nurse selected as a McCann Scholar, the only national award by a private foundation that recognizes outstanding mentors in medicine, nursing, and science. In 2005, Dr. Naylor was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine.

Dr. Naylor is also the National Program Director for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program, Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI).  The primary goal of the INQRI program is to generate, disseminate and translate research to understand how nurses contribute to and can improve the quality of patient care. The program supports interdisciplinary teams of nurse scholars and scholars from other disciplines to address the gaps in knowledge about the relationship between nursing and health care quality.

Katherine Abbott, MGS, PhD

Dr. Abbot is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Dr. Abbott’s research on social networks, health, and health care utilization of chronically ill elders focuses on the role informal networks play in monitoring symptoms and managing chronic conditions as well as providing emotional and instrumental support. Additionally, her research explores the relationship between informal network characteristics and health care utilization. Dr. Abbott’s future research plans include untangling causal relationships in how health affects the ability to maintain informal ties, as well as the extent to which informal ties are helpful in maintaining health. Determining which ties are helpful versus which ties are harmful to health is critical in understanding how people are encouraged or discouraged to obtain formal care.

Kathryn H. Bowles, PhD, RN, FAAN

Dr. Bowles is an Associate Professor, leading an interdisciplinary program of research that blends health information technology and the care of the elderly. Her NIH funded work includes the development of a decision support system for post-discharge referral decisions as older adults transition from a hospitalization. She currently leads a randomized clinical trial to test the clinical and cost effectiveness of home telemonitoring of older adults with heart failure. Other interests include the development and use of clinical information systems and standardized nursing languages to collect and describe the contribution of nursing to patient outcomes.

Joan K. Davitt, PhD

Dr. Davitt is an Assistant Professor & Hartford Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice. She completed the Master of Social Service and Master of Law and Social Policy as well as the Ph.D. in social work from Bryn Mawr College. She has over twenty years of experience developing and administering health and long term care services as a gerontological social worker, combining advocacy, policy, and organizing work with direct practice. Her current research interests include understanding the connections between policy and practice and their impact on access to care and health care outcomes for older adults, and ethical issues in long term care.

Her recent research on Medicare home health care has uncovered racial disparities in access to care in the wake of the Balanced Budget Act. She continues to investigate racial disparities in home care access and outcomes under the prospective payment system. Dr. Davitt was selected into the first cohort of scholars at the NIA funded Institute on Aging and Social Work and was recently awarded the James Zimmer New Investigator Award from the Gerontological Health section of the American Public Health Association. She has published numerous articles on health and long term care as well as the book, Current Practice in High-Tech Home Care, co-authored with Lenard Kaye, which was recently published in German. She has received research support from the Andrus Foundation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the John A. Hartford Foundation, and the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation and Institute for Urban Research.

Janice B. Foust, PhD, RN

Dr. Foust is a Nurse Research Associate at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY), Center for Home Care Policy and Research. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing from the University of New Hampshire in 1978, her Masters of Science in Nursing from Boston College in 1985 and her PhD from University of Pennsylvania in 1994. 

She has a longstanding commitment to improving post-hospital transitions for older adults as both a clinician and scholar. Her dissertation was a qualitative study describing nurses’ discharge planning efforts. She was also an Advanced Practice Nurse on a transitional care study led by Dr. Mary Naylor. She was a John A. Hartford Foundation Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity post-doctoral scholar at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (2003-2005). Building on her clinical experience and dissertation, her post-doctoral work focused on describing the problems of hospital discharge medication reconciliation as a critical issue of transition.

Dr. Foust’s research aims to identify effective, interdisciplinary interventions to improve post-hospital transitions into home care; reduce transition-related problems of medication management; and improve self-management among recently discharged older adults into home care.  

Jennifer Hornung Garvin, Ph.D., RHIA, CPHQ, CCS, CTR, FAHIMA

Dr. Garvin’s research interests center on the use of coded and administrative data in medical, nursing, public health, and health services research. She is currently a medical informatics postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion (CHERP) sponsored by the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center (PVAMC) in association with the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (SOM). Her postdoctoral research focuses on the uses of coded data and its accuracy in a 2003 PVAMC inpatient cohort as it relates to the Elixhauser Comorbidity Measure. She is currently a co-investigator for research funded by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) that will further explore pay-for-performance in primary care. In addition, she has also been a principal investigator funded by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) Foundation for Education and Research (FORE). Past research includes, ICD-10 and public health reporting, fraud and abuse prevention associated with computer assisted/auto coding, the preparedness of coding professionals for future roles in coding, and development of a public health Lyme disease prevention assessment instrument.

She received her PhD from the Department of Public Health at Temple University, a bachelor degree in Psychology from Temple University, a postbaccalaureate certificate and associate degree from the HIM Program at Gwynedd-Mercy College, an MBA with a specialization in health care from St. Joseph’s University, completed the Clinical Research Certificate Program at the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and is finishing a graduate Certificate in Biomedical Informatics at Oregon Health and Science University. She was also awarded a National Library of Medicine fellowship in Woods Hole, MA for bioinformatics in 2005.

Karen B. Hirschman, PhD, MSW

Dr. Hirschman came to the School of Nursing in July, 2004 after completing a two-year NRSA Post-Doctoral Training Program in Age-Related Neurodegenerative Diseases in the School of Medicine at Penn. With a background in social work and social welfare and training with a multidisciplinary team of healthcare experts through her fellowship, Dr. Hirschman brings this uniquely blended experience as an interdisciplinary researcher to the School of Nursing. Dr. Hirschman’s work has both policy and practice implications for individuals with cognitive impairment, their families and the providers caring for these elders.

Dr. Hirschman’s program of research is centered on advance care planning, decision making, caregiver burden and end-of-life care with a specific emphasis on individuals with cognitive impairments and their family members. Since she came to the School of Nursing in 2004, Dr. Hirschman has received funding from the Alzheimer’s Association and was the first School of Nursing recipient of funding from the Institute on Aging Pilot Grant program. Dr. Hirschman brings her wealth of knowledge and experience with older adults to Dr. Mary Naylor’s research team and involved in two NIH grants: 1) Hospital to Home: Cognitively Impaired Elders/Caregivers (NIA 5R01AG023116-02 ) and 2) Health related quality of life: Elders in long-term care (NIA 1R01AG025524-01A2). Both projects focus on understanding transitions in health and transitions in care for older adults. These experiences have enabled her to broaden her research experience and expand her program of to include health care transitions for persons with cognitive impairments and their families.

Arlene D. Houldin, PhD, APRN, BC

Dr. Arlene Houldin is a clinician, educator, and researcher whose scholarship is focused in the area of psychosocial oncology specifically on the impact of cancer on psychosocial functioning of patients and their families. Dr. Houldin is an Associate Professor of Psychosocial Oncology Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, Program Director of the Adult Nurse Practitioner: Advanced Practice Oncology Nursing Program, and Nursing Director of the Philadelphia Veterans’ Administration Medical Center Palliative Care Service. She has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Oncology Nursing Society initiatives related to addressing minority issues in oncology advanced practice nursing curriculum; examining the illness experiences of patients newly diagnosed with advanced colorectal cancer and their caregivers; and developing and testing a patient-focused support intervention.

In 2006, Dr. Houldin received funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to provide leadership in convening a “State of the Science in Cancer Survivorship” invitational symposium that synthesized the existing research on adult survivorship issues, comprehensively addressed the challenges and gaps in the research, and provided a roadmap for clinical practice and research. Additionally, she has served as co-investigator and site-PI on an NIH funded multi-site cancer control study testing a psycho-educational intervention with children and mothers with breast cancer. Dr. Houldin serves on several editorial boards and has authored two books and numerous peer-reviewed publications in the field of psycho-oncology.

Kathleen McCauley, PhD, FAAN, RN, CS

Dr. McCauley is an Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Nursing, and Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor, and Associate Dean for Academic Programs at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.  Dr. McCauley has been involved in transitional care research for many years. As a Clinician Educator with an appointment at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, her influence in establishing productive relationships with clinicians has been an asset to investigators conducting research at HUP. As a member of Dr. Naylor’s research team, Dr. McCauley’s clinical expertise has been instrumental in ensuring that the clinical protocol that drives advanced practice nurse care is evidence based and clinically relevant. As a center member Dr. McCauley will continue her partnership with Drs. Naylor, Bowles and Hirschman, as well as other researchers to identify even more effective strategies to ensure optimum care for vulnerable elders and others during care transitions.

Dr. McCauley is a Fellow in the Council on Cardiovascular Nursing at the American Heart Association and a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (2000–2003) and is finishing a term on the Nursing Committee of the Heart Failure Society of America. She has been an active volunteer at the national level of the American Heart Association including coordination of a conference on Heart Failure Disease Management.

Salimah H. Meghani, PhD, MBE, CRNP

Salimah H. Meghani, PhD, MBE, CRNP is a new Assistant Professor at University of Pennsylvania, School of Nursing. She received her bachelor’s degree in Nursing from the Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan in 1997 and obtained a Joint PhD in Nursing/MBE from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 2005. Her current work includes an exploration of “Factors Affecting Negotiation of Treatment for Cancer Pain among African Americans” (Research support: Center for Health Equity Research Promotion Competitive Pilot Award; Oncology Nursing Society Foundation/Purdue Pharma Trish Green Nursing Grant). This program of research is geared towards a better understanding of the perceived social, cultural, and health system factors that impede appropriate treatment of cancer pain among African Americans. She is also working on a project to document the inequities in opioid availability for cancer pain treatment between developed and developing nations; a component of this work includes efforts to understand the underlying factors for these international disparities in cancer pain treatment. She was awarded the Harvard Medical School Scholarship for the Program in Palliative Care Education and Practice, Boston, MA. This scholarship was intended for the faculty development in palliative and taught by national palliative care experts.

Since 2005, she has served on Pennsylvania Department of Aging Taskforce for Quality at the End of Life. As part of this taskforce, she has worked with a team of consumers, clinicians and academicians on documenting the status of palliative care in Pennsylvania and generating recommendations for Governor Rendell & Secretary of Aging, Eisenhower to improving end-of-life care for Pennsylvanians. Her research interests include health disparities, cancer pain disparities, palliative care, patient-centered outcomes, and international disparities in opioid availability for medical use between developed and developing nations.

Dr. Meghani’s research trajectory is intended at identifying sources of racial and ethnic disparities in pain treatment and palliative care; tease out legitimate differences from illegitimate differences (inequities); understand patient-centered outcomes in pain treatment; and identify culturally appropriate models of pain treatment and palliative care for minorities and underserved.

Helene Moriarty, PhD, RN, CS 

Dr. Moriarty is a Nurse Researcher, Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center (PVAMC) and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.  Dr. Moriarty is recognized as a leader in family research. She has conducted research with families experiencing varied stressors and transitions, such as death of a child, divorce, child custody disputes, intrafamilial violence, and cancer. Currently, she is working with Dr. Joanne Robinson, visiting scholar (Rutgers University) and Lisette Bunting-Perry, RN, MScN, a predoctoral fellow (Penn Nursing), on two funded studies examining transitions in patients with Parkinson’s disease and their families. One study investigates the quality, distress, impact, and management of lower urinary tract symptoms in male veterans with Parkinson’s disease. Building on this work, the second study aims to advance understanding of how caregivers experience and manage urinary symptoms in their spouses/partners with Parkinson’s disease. Findings from these studies will be used to guide the development of an intervention study that addresses the needs of PD patients and their caregivers in managing lower urinary tract symptoms and Parkinson’s disease.  In her role at the PVAMC as Nurse Researcher, Dr. Moriarty is responsible for directing, supporting, and promoting nursing research, as well as conducting research. She also provides research guidance to nurses who are studying transitions in military veterans related to illness, pain, substance abuse, trauma, combat experience, and deployment.

JANET PRVU BETTGER, ScD

Dr. Prvu Bettger is a postdoctoral research fellow in neurorehabilitation in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently she is investigating the epidemiology of recovery in post-acute care and examining the interaction of care patterns and contextual factors for their association with patient and health system outcomes. She holds a doctorate in Rehabilitation Science from Boston University where she investigated patterns of functional recovery and factors predicting patient outcomes following acute rehabilitation and the transition to community. While completing her doctorate, Janet was the project director for the Paul Coverdell National Acute Stroke Registry quality improvement project in Massachusetts that successfully leveraged state policy for designating stroke centers to improve hospital adherence to clinical practice guidelines. Her research interests are driven by a commitment to improve quality of care, particularly the effectiveness and continuity of health and support services for individuals with chronic conditions.

Barbara Riegel, DNSc, RN, FAAN, FAHA 

Dr. Barbara Riegel is an Associate Professor of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, founding Editor and current Co-Editor of the Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing (JCN). She is an established nurse scientist with a primary interest in heart failure self-care. Dr. Riegel wrote a situation-specific theory of heart failure self-care, developed a widely used measurement instrument to assess self-care as a decision-making process, and tested several approaches to engaging patients in active self-care. For example, Dr. Riegel has conducted several disease management trials, tested a peer mentoring approach, and is currently testing a motivational approach to promoting heart failure self-care. She is currently funded by NIH to test the influence of daytime sleepiness on heart failure self-care.

Dr. Riegel has published widely on the issues faced by this particular patient population. She has written over 120 scholarly publications in peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary and international journals, edited four books, and authored numerous book chapters. Dr. Riegel is a fellow in the American Heart Association and the American Academy of Nursing.

Connie M. Ulrich, PhD, RN

Dr. Ulrich is an Assistant Professor of Bioethics and Nursing in the School of Nursing with a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine. She is also a Senior Fellow in the Center for Bioethics and Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. Dr. Ulrich received a bachelor and masters of science degree in nursing from the Catholic University of America and a doctorate in nursing ethics from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Dr. Ulrich also received postdoctoral training in bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, Department of Clinical Bioethics from 2001-2003. Her training included working with research subjects and researchers at the NIH to address ethical issues via ethics consultations, participation in ethics committee work and IRB review of research proposals, completion of the course on ethical and regulatory aspects of clinical research, and conducting independent empirical bioethics research. Thus, her areas of expertise include research and clinical ethics and empirical bioethics.

Dr. Ulrich has received funding for her research from the American Nurses Foundation, the Department of Clinical Bioethics and Department of Social Work, National Institutes of Health, the Oncology Nurses Society/Pennsylvania Health Formula Research Funds, and the American College of Radiology/Pennsylvania Tobacco Funds. She has published her work in multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journals. She also provides bioethics consultation to several nurse researchers on their NIH funded grants and is a member of Joint Commission Ethics Research Panel Group that is currently studying issues related to organ donation after cardiac death, issues of informed consent and patient autononmy. She is also currently a core member of the Recruitment and Retention Core of the Abramson Cancer Center and the Clinical Trials Education and Recruitment Working Group for the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group/NCI.