Leadership in Action: Alumni, Faculty, Staff and Student Milestones

DorAnne Donesky Selected for Tideswell Emerging Leaders in Aging Program

Associate Adjunct Professor of Physiological Nursing DorAnne Donesky is one of 16 scholars selected to participate in Emerging Leaders in Aging, a program of Tideswell at UCSF, the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and the Association of Directors of Geriatric Academic Programs (ADGAP).

DorAnne Donesky The program uses principles from applied behavioral sciences and startup culture to help health care leaders develop and augment their leadership skills with the goal of promoting the well-being of older adults through clinical, research, policy and educational initiatives.

Beginning in the fall of 2016, Donesky and the other Tideswell scholars will participate in yearlong workshops and mentoring activities focused on further developing self-awareness, team leadership and creativity. They will convene to share their insights during a meeting preceding the 2017 AGS Annual Meeting in San Antonio.

Hildy Schell-Chaple Receives UCSF PRIDE Award

Hildy Schell-Chaple receives the 2016 PRIDE Award from UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood. On August 30, 2016, Hildy Schell-Chaple, associate clinical professor in the Department of Physiological Nursing, received the UCSF PRIDE Award, recognizing her commitment to the medical center’s core values: professionalism, respect, integrity, diplomacy and excellence.

Schell-Chaple (MS ’93, PhD ’16) has worked at the medical center as a clinical nurse specialist in adult critical care since 1992, and has served as a member of the School’s volunteer faculty for 23 years. Her research focuses on the impact of body-temperature changes on critically ill patients and developing the evidence base surrounding the treatment of fever.

Monica McLemore Is Featured Speaker at the White House Frontiers Conference

Monica McLemore On October 13, 2016, Monica McLemore, assistant professor in the Department of Family Health Care Nursing and associate director for community-engaged research for the UCSF Preterm Birth Initiative (PTBI), spoke as part of the White House Frontiers Conference. President Obama hosted the conference, which was live-streamed around the U.S. and focused on building the country’s capacity in science, technology, innovation and the related challenges that will shape the future.

McLemore’s presentation, “Underserved/Disparities: Partnering to Address Critical Research Questions,” outlined the work of the PTBI.

For more information, see “Monica McLemore at Frontiers Conference.”

Ulrike Muench Explores the Gender Pay Gap in Nursing

Ulrike Muench In the September/October 2016 issue of Nursing Economics, Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences Ulrike Muench, with co-authors Susan H. Busch and Jody L. Sindelar of the Yale School of Public Health and Peter I. Buerhaus of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, published a study on earnings differences between female and male RNs in the U.S.

The study, “Exploring Explanations for the Female-Male Earnings Difference Among Registered Nurses in the United States,” examined whether four factors – career aspiration, workplace experience, time out for child-rearing and physical strength – could explain the existing gap between annual earnings of female and male RNs.

Muench and her colleagues found some evidence for motivational differences in career aspirations (female RNs were not as mobile across states and changed employers less frequently than their male counterparts), but no evidence to support the other factors examined as potential causes for the pay gap. They concluded: “Given the expansion of nurses’ roles in health care delivery, and the increasing numbers of nurses as the population ages, serious deliberations of how to respond to the earnings gap in nursing [are] warranted.”

Kellie Freeborn Receives NINR Grant to Study HIV Risk Behavior Change

Kellie Freeborn, PhD degree candidate and assistant clinical professor in the Department of Community Health Systems, has received a two-year predoctoral grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research for her research project, “Risk Behavior Change in the Era of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV.”

The F31 grant, intended to assist students working toward doctoral degrees to participate in full-time, mentored research training, will allow Freeborn, who works as an adult nurse practitioner at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF), to work on the project with School of Nursing alumnus Pierre Cédric Crouch, director of nursing at SFAF’s Magnet sexual health clinic.

Lisa Thompson to Lead UCSF Arm of $30 Million Trial to Fight Household Air Pollution

Lisa Thompson The National Institutes of Health (NIH), with partial support through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has awarded a multi-institution team of researchers $30 million over five years to investigate an intervention to reduce the impact of household air pollution in four low- to medium-income countries. Lisa Thompson, associate professor in the Department of Family Health Care Nursing, who has participated in previous studies of household air pollution’s effects on health, will lead the UC San Francisco arm of the trial.

The trial, led by the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Colorado State University, will provide cleaner-burning cooking stoves to randomly selected households in Guatemala, India, Peru and Rwanda, where people traditionally cook with open fires or solid fuels. These methods are associated with household air pollution that contributes to premature death and other health problems in low-income regions.

Researchers will compare health outcomes among infants, children and adults in the intervention group with those of households using customary cooking practices to determine if cleaner-burning stoves can be linked with better health.

In addition to UCSF’s Thompson, the research team will include investigators from the Berkeley Air Monitoring Group, Harvard University, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, India’s Sri Ramachandra University, the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, the University of Georgia, Peru’s Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia and Washington University in St. Louis.

Former School of Nursing Student Inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame

Aiko “Grace” Obata Amemiya On August 20, 2016, Aiko “Grace” Obata Amemiya was inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame by the state’s Department of Human Rights and the Iowa Commission on the Status of Women.

In 2009, Amemiya was instrumental in persuading UC Regents to grant honorary degrees to the 700 UC students who were denied education due to their internment during World War II.

Amemiya was a nursing student at UC San Francisco in 1942 when she and her family were forcibly detained in an Arizona internment camp alongside thousands of other Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals, in accordance with an executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She eventually completed her nursing studies at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota School of Nursing in Rochester, Minn., and cared for wounded soldiers at the Army’s Schick General Hospital in Clinton, Iowa.

For more information, see “Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame Inductee Amemiya.”

Certified Nurse-Midwife John Fassett Profiled on Hoodline

Hoodline, an online Bay Area news magazine, recently profiled John Fassett (MS ’94), one of the nation’s few practicing male midwives. (Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center’s Julio Diaz-Abarca is another.)

The article traces Fassett’s journey from nursing school to the Navy to the nurse-midwifery program at UC San Francisco School of Nursing, where he was the only man in his class. He currently delivers babies and provides full-scope midwifery care at the Sutter Pacific Medical Foundation’s California Campus in San Francisco.

PhD Student Ajaree Betz Describes Experiences Teaching Nursing in Thailand

In the October 6, 2016, edition of UCSF’s Synapse, Ajaree Betz, a first-year PhD degree student in the School of Nursing, discusses her work as an instructor in a Thai nursing college, where she and groups of students made home visits to provide health care and education to that country’s rural communities.

Each year, UC San Francisco (UCSF) School of Nursing is ranked among the top graduate schools in the nation.