SCHOLAR DIRECTORY

Cynthia Horton Dias completed a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing with a Spanish minor from Clemson University in 2006. She is currently a BSN to PhD student in the Nursing Science program at the University of South Carolina. After several years of bedside nursing experience in various medical-surgical specialties and hospitals, she first attained certification in medical-surgical nursing in 2011. She also gained hospital-based education experience as the Clinical Nurse Educator for a small community hospital with oversight of a Long Term Acute Care ICU and medical-surgical units, emergency room, and a skilled nursing unit. She was recently recognized at her hospital with an Excellence in Nursing award. Her personal experience with the high-stress environment of acute care hospitals, prompted her interest in exploring the many factors that influence nurses’ self-care experiences in the workplace. She is currently the PI for a qualitative inquiry into the dietary behaviors of shift-work nurses in hospitals. The findings from this study will inform her dissertation, which will evaluate the hospital food environment from the nurses’ perspective. She is also actively engaged in research on dietary behaviors of shift-work firefighters and an intervention study on the perceptions of a plant-based diet for African Americans. Her future program of research will focus on health promotion and chronic disease prevention through lifestyle methods, primarily diet, and will incorporate multi-level interventions.