CSON joins Nurses Climate Challenge, faculty members and students

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Research

The Connell School launched Innovation Grants, a resource program designed to fund small research projects that are essential to supporting large external research grant applications. The first two funded projects are:

▪ “Associations among Cannabis Policies, Cannabis Use, and Patient-Provider Communication among Cancer

Survivors,” a project by principal investigator and Assistant Professor Lindsey Camp and her team: Summer

Hawkins, from BC’s School of Social Work, and CSON

Clinical Assistant Professor Catherine Conahan.

▪ “Strangulation and Asphyxiation: A Data-Driven

Exploration of Offender Characteristics and Predictor

Factors,” a project led by Clinical Assistant Professor

Victor Petreca. His team includes CSON Professor Ann

Wolbert Burgess and Clinical Instructor Melissa Pérez

Capotosto; Michelle Patch, from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing; and BC Visiting Scholar Gary Brucato.

Victor Petreca Petreca and his research team also received funding from the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health’s Jail/Arrest Diversion Grant Program for their project “Exploring the Biopsychosocial Factors in Diversion to Other Treatment-Based Alternatives.”

The American College of Nurse-Midwives awarded Ph.D. student Erin George its 2022 Dianne S. Moore Midwifery Research Scholarship.

Danielle Walker, a student in the Ph.D. program, received the Gennaro Acampora Junior Investigator Pilot Award from the Boston Medical Center Department of Psychiatry.

Danielle Walker

Photographs by Caitlin Cunningham except Victor Petreca by Peter Julian; Danielle Walker by Christine Demura; Rear Admiral Aisha K. Mix by Flavio DeBarros; Ann Wolbert Burgess and Steven Matthew Constantine by Lee Pellegrini CSON’s vaccination team at Cristo Rey: (seated) Sara Bowen, Vy Hoang, Emily Bower, Katlyn Noonan, Megan Fickes. (Standing) Jennifer Schmitz, Caitlin Martin, Shannon Croly, Natalie Dalla Riva, Catherine Conahan, Donna Cullinan, Celia Jotte, Nora Markey, and Brandon Onyechefule.

Community

CSON joined the Nurses Climate Challenge: School of Nursing Commitment, a global initiative to educate 50,000 health professionals about the health impacts of climate change.

Clinical Assistant Professors Catherine Conahan and Donna Cullinan and CSON students conducted outreach and organized a mobile vaccination clinic at Cristo Rey Boston High School, helping Cristo Rey increase the COVID-19 vaccination rate among its student population from 50 percent to 82 percent.

Students

Cameron Howe Last fall, Cameron Howe ’18, D.N.P. ’23, helped save the life of an elite runner who suffered a cardiac arrest at the Boston Marathon’s eighth mile. Howe and a friend administered CPR on 33-year-old Meghan Roth before the ambulance arrived. “I’m so lucky they were there,” Roth said. “They saved my life.” The story was in the Washington Post, People, and on WCVB-TV Channel 5 News.

Ph.D. student Katie Fitzgerald Jones is one of 30 clinicians named a 2022 Hospice and Palliative Nurses Foundation Emerging Leader.

The International Association for Human Caring honored Ph.D. student Katherine Ladetto with its 2022 Jean Watson Student Award.

IN MEMORY

Retired Professor Mary E. Duffy, who served as director of nursing research, died on March 30 at age 79.

Sandra R. Mott, a retired associate professor and department chair at the Connell School of Nursing who taught at BC from 1979–2011, died on January 21 at age 79.

Faculty

In March, Dean Katherine Gregory gave the keynote address at Boston College’s 71st annual Laetare Sunday celebration.

Dean Gregory and Associate Professor Nadia Abuelezam were featured in the winter 2022 issue of Boston College Magazine. They discussed the lessons learned from COVID-19 and how to better prepare for the next outbreak.

Abuelezam and her Connell School colleagues Andrew Dwyer and Jinhee Park were promoted to associate professor with tenure. During their Tenure Talks—which the school introduced this spring— Abuelezam, Dwyer, and Park each provided the CSON community with an overview of their research and its importance.

In their new book A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind, Professor Ann Wolbert Burgess and Steven Matthew Constantine, CSON’s associate director of marketing and communications, detail Burgess’s role in the evolution of criminal profiling and its application to several serial killer investigations. Burgess was featured on ABC News.com, and she commented on the Gabby Petito murder case in Newsweek and on Fox News and NewsNation Now.

Clinical Instructor Melissa Pérez Capotosto was appointed to the Nursing for Women’s Health editorial advisory board.

Clinical Assistant Professor Julie Dunne was appointed teaching associate at Harvard Medical School, where she will mentor health care providers in mindfulness and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.

Associate Professor Joyce K. Edmonds was named editor in chief of the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, & Neonatal Nursing, the scientific journal of the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses. In April, Edmonds was a visiting scholar at the University of Hawai‘i’s M noa Nancy Atmospera-Walch School of Nursing.

Associate Dean for Research Christopher Lee was the only nurse who contributed to the new “Guideline for the Management of Heart Failure.” Published in 2022 by the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, and the Heart Failure Society of America, the guidelines are targeted to clinicians involved in the care of people with cardiovascular disease.

Ann Wolbert Burgess and Steven Matthew Constantine Rear Admiral Aisha K. Mix

Events

In March, Rear Admiral Aisha K. Mix, chief nurse officer at the U.S. Public Health Service, presented the Spring 2022 Pinnacle Lecture: “Innovative Leadership and the Public Health Nursing Workforce of the Future.”

As part of the Global Scholars Lecture Series, sponsored by BC’s Office of Global Engagement and Office of International Students & Scholars, CSON Marjory Gordon Scholars Stella Adereti and Luca Bertocchi presented “Nursing’s Impact on Health and Well-Becoming: A Global Perspective” in March.

This spring, CSON continued its Grand Rounds lectures:

▪ Gaurdia E. Banister, executive director of the Institute for Patient Care at Massachusetts General Hospital, gave a talk titled “Racism in Nursing” in March. ▪ Randy Jones, professor and associate dean for partner development and engagement at the University of

Virginia School of Nursing, discussed “Narrowing the

Gap in Decision-Making in Prostate Cancer” in April. ▪ Laura Hayman, professor at the University of

Massachusetts Boston’s Manning College of Nursing and Health Sciences, gave a lecture titled “Promoting

Cardiovascular Health across the Life Course: Social

Determinants Matter” in May.

Recordings of these lectures are available at bc.edu/csongrandrounds.

Katherine O’Neill ’73 will receive CSON’s Dean Rita P. Kelleher Award at an event on June 4. A past president of the Massachusetts School Nurse Organization and fellow of the National Academy of School Nursing, Katherine O’Neill O’Neill also served on the board of directors of the National Association of School Nurses and as a founding member of the Massachusetts School Nurse Research Network. Learn more at bc.edu/kelleher.