The future of nursing

THE FUTURE OF NURSING RESEARCH

Shannon Zenk, an alumna of UIC Nursing who spent 14 years on faculty, is the new director of the National Institute of Nursing Research, NIH's arm for nursing science.

When Shannon Zenk, PhD, MS ’99, MPH, FAAN, was an early-career nurse, she worked in home healthcare near the Twin Cities, caring for patients after they returned from the hospital.

Though only there about a year, the experience left an impression that would later drive her research career.

“What really struck me was how people’s living conditions made such a powerful impact on their health, both in terms of the privilege that some people had as well as the deprivation or poverty that other people faced,” she said. Zenk began studying neighborhood conditions as they relate to health. Her pioneering work on food deserts drew national attention to the problem of inadequate access to healthy foods in low-income and Black neighborhoods. At only mid-career, she’s been extraordinarily productive, with more than 107 journal papers, almost 7,000 citations, and $50 million (past or current) in extramural grant funding to her name.

Now, she’ll have an opportunity to shape the direction of nursing research for the entire nation.

As only the third permanent director of the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) since it became an institute in 1993,

she’ll oversee its annual budget of $170 million, supporting extramural research institutions (like UIC) and directing an intramural program on the NIH campus to improve the lives of individuals and families living with illness.

Zenk says she’s “grown up at UIC,” earning a dual master’s degree in public health nursing and community health sciences and spending 14 years on faculty. During her tenure at UIC Nursing, she was inducted into the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame and invested as Nursing Collegiate Professor, a philanthropically funded position. Zenk says she sees her position at NINR as an opportunity to improve the health of patients and populations, strengthen the nation’s healthcare system and achieve health equity. That’s especially true as the nation grapples with a once-in-a-century pandemic and complex, systemic health inequities caused by a wide socioeconomic divide.

“Nursing puts the patient, family and community at the center of practice and of research,” says Zenk, who was also a fellow at UIC’s Institute for Health Research and Policy. “As our country faces critical challenges impacting our health, including the coronavirus pandemic, structural racism, and so many others, nursing research is more important than ever.”