SCHOLAR DIRECTORY

I am a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) student in the Family Nurse Practitioner track at University of Washington. My goal as a family nurse practitioner is to embody the tripartite role of the DNP provider by pursuing practice inquiry, leadership, and advanced practice to promote health equity. As a nurse practitioner, I want to collaborate with Veterans, particularly women and members of the LGBTQIA community, to identify ways in which we can improve practice and care delivery. My research and clinical practice interests include women’s health, family practice, public health, health policy, and dermatology. My work as an RN has been in acute care inpatient and outpatient Blood & Marrow Transplant and Hematology/Oncology at the Puget Sound VA Medical Center and University of Washington Medical Center. I am currently engaged in research examining health policy approaches to childhood obesity prevention and will present these findings at the 2016 American Public Health Association Annual Meeting. I serve as a Family Nurse Practitioner student representative on the University of Washington DNP Coordinating Committee. I am a member of the core leadership team of Health Equity Circle, an interdisciplinary group of students organizing to promote social justice within healthcare and the broader community. I am a Commissioner on the Seattle Women’s Commission— a group of 21 individuals advising the Mayor, City Council, and city departments on issues facing women in Seattle— where I serve on the Community Health and Wellness Subcommittee and am involved in examining healthcare access for Seattle’s women Veterans.

I have been a Registered Nurse for 25 years and an Advanced Practice Nurse Practitioner for the last 7 years. I work full time as an Assistant Professor of Nursing at St. Vincent’s College. I also work part time as an APRN in the community health setting visiting elderly clients and performing annual health assessments and as a RN per diem on a cardiac unit in a urban area hospital. I work with the heart failure patients as a RN and as an APRN and there is a need for better discharge planning in this population. With the nationwide crisis of significant 30 day readmission rates in the heart failure population, I want to work in this area with my DNP project to help improve the discharge process as well as improve patient outcomes. I am currently enrolled in the DNP program at Sacred Heart University and will be graduating in May 2018.

I grew up in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, PA. I matriculated from Pennsylvania State University, B.S. Education (’03), Hawaii Pacific University, M.A. Global Leadership (’07), and University of Pittsburgh, B.S.N. (’11). I circumnavigated the globe on a journey of discovery with Semester at Sea (’02) and traveled for graduate research projects in Australia and New Zealand. I was a high school teacher in Sweden, Korea, and California. After I obtained my Master’s degree, I accepted a position as Associate Director of Graduate Admissions in Hawaii. I commissioned in 2012 and served as a staff nurse, CCRN, in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where I was a primary transport nurse for critically ill neonates throughout the DC metro area, charge nurse, and chair of the unit practice council. I joined the Registered Nurse Anesthetist DNP program at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in May 2015 to graduate in May 2018. My DNP capstone project is rooted in research I completed as a staff nurse on measuring and mitigating incivility in the workplace.

Lauren Starr is pursuing a PhD in Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on palliative and end-of-life care. She is researching the measurement of pain in persons with advanced dementia, and the connection between caregiver empathy and pain management in the same population. Prior to graduating from Penn’s accelerated BSN program in 2015 and becoming a Registered Nurse, Lauren cared for her husband’s 103-year-old grandfather, who lived and died at home with them. She is in Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing. Lauren graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 2004 with a degree in English literature, a certificate in American Studies, and a focus in Bioethics. After graduation, she worked for the Bioethics Advisory Committee of Singapore and the Genome Institute of Singapore on the genome project of Asia and legislation protecting human subjects in research. She is a 2004-2005 Henry Luce Scholar. Upon returning to the U.S., Lauren worked for the Advisory Board Company in Washington DC as a research analyst in hospital consulting. She then spent three years working at Google in New York City as a healthcare market analyst in research and marketing across sales and product development. After working in the start-up world, Lauren worked for Scripps Networks Interactive in New York as a Digital Research and Analytics Manager finding stories in data and making data meaningful and actionable for sales and programming teams. Lauren’s mentors are Mary Ersek, PhD, RN, FAAN and Christine Bradway, PhD, RN, CRNP, FAAN.

Ph.D., MSN-Ed, RN and Jonas Scholar with specialty nursing experience in nurse management, emergency, trauma, intensive care, occupational health, and wellness nursing. Nursing faculty experience at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Dedicated, reliable, ethical, and compassionate nurse scientist focusing on enhancing the field of nursing through research, education, and mentoring. I am passionate about the study of how our experiences and backgrounds as nurses correlate with the care we give to our patients and to ourselves. Champion of social media tools and technologies with up-to-date knowledge in online social networking and its developing and robust relevance to research, education, nursing practice, and knowledge dissemination. I serve in a nurse management position (Emergency, Inpatient, and Mother/Baby) at our local critical access hospital and a faculty role in a graduate school of nursing. I am grateful and proud to be a Jonas Scholar – Cohort V.