11th Annual Penn Medicine Nursing Research and Evidence-based Practice Virtual Conference

Lusine Poghosyan, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN, is the Stone Foundation and Elise D. Fish Professor of Nursing at Columbia University School of Nursing and Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Poghosyan is also the Executive Director of the Center for Healthcare Delivery Research and Innovations at Columbia University. She is an internationally recognized nurse scientist with health services research expertise and studies primary care organizations, nursing workforce, teamwork, and quality of patient care, particularly for older adults with chronic diseases, racial and ethnic minority patients, and those living in underserved areas. Her research produces evidence to support the optimal use of nurse practitioners as primary care providers and build primary care teams to assure patients have access to timely, safe, and high-quality primary care; this work is key to eliminating persistent health disparities.

Dr. Poghosyan is the Principal Investigator on multiple federal- and foundation-funded research projects supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Council of State Boards of Nursing among others. Dr. Poghosyan is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and the New York Academy of Medicine. She serves on the AcademyHealth Board of Directors and was the past Chair of the Primary Care Expert Panel at the American Academy of Nursing. Dr. Poghosyan has been recognized for her contributions and is a recipient of multiple awards, including the International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame from Sigma Theta Tau International and Mentorship Award from AcademyHealth’s Interdisciplinary Research Group on Nursing Issues.

Kenrick Cato, PhD, RN, CPHIMS, FAAN, FACMI is a Professor of Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and a Nurse Scientist for Pediatric Data and Analytics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Dr. Cato is a respected creator and evaluator of decision-support tools. Dr. Cato is a clinical informatician whose research focuses on applying state-of-the-art data science methods to electronic patient data to support decision-making for clinicians, patients, and caregivers.

He is the author of over 100 publications, with several notable awards. He was awarded the Bronze Star from the United States Army in 2005, elected to the New York Academy of Medicine in 2015, the American Academy of Nursing in 2019, and the American College of Medical Informatics in 2023.

Sara F. Jacoby, PhD, MPH, MSN, FAAN is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing with a secondary appointment in the Department of Surgery at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research addresses the socio-structural determinants of injury risk and recovery in urban environments with emphasis on place and policy-based etiologies of racialized disparities in trauma and firearm violence victimization. Her work identifies ways in which health risks and opportunities for injury recovery have been constructed in American cities and informs effective means of injury prevention and trauma care. She also focuses on legal and ethical issues that arise when clinical interventions and law enforcement intersect in healthcare experience of traumatically injured people. Her research has been sponsored by the NIH, CDC, and private foundations.

Dr. Jacoby received her BA from Rutgers College, her MPH from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, her BSN, MSN, and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She is a Senior Scholar of the Penn Injury Science Center and Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

A veteran of over 25 years of clinical practice experience as a staff nurse, nurse manager, and advanced practice nurse in acute care and outpatient settings, Dr. Charlotte Thomas-Hawkins joined the Rutgers School of Nursing (SON) faculty after receiving her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She is a tenured Associate Professor and the Associate Dean for the Nursing Science Division in the School of Nursing. She also serves as the Co-Chair of the SON’s Anti-Racism and Anti-Bias Committee, the Chairperson for the Rutgers Biomedical Health Sciences (RBHS) Diversity Leadership Council, and a member and past Chairperson of the RBHS Anti-Racism Task Force.

Dr. Thomas-Hawkins is an active nursing workforce researcher, and her program of research has largely focused on the impact of nurse staffing, adequacy of nursing care processes, workload, and practice environment support on patient safety and nurse outcomes in outpatient dialysis settings. This work was supported by research grants from the American Nephrology Nurses’ Association and led to changes in CMS federal reguirements for RN staffing in all US outpatient dialysis centers. Her current work is focused on the impact of workplace racism on nurses’ well-being and job-related outcomes across practice settings.

Dr. Thomas-Hawkins received her diploma in nursing from Temple University Hospital School of Nursing, Philadelphia, PA; her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Thomas-Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA; and her Master of Science in Nursing and PhD in nursing science from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. She was inducted as a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing in October 2019.

George Demiris is a PIK (Penn Integrates Knowledge) University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and holds joint faculty appointments in the Department of Biobehavioral Health Sciences of the School of Nursing where he serves as Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, and the Informatics Division of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine. He explores innovative ways to utilize technology and support older adults and their families in various settings, including home and hospice care. He also focuses on designing and evaluating personal health systems that produce patient-generated data including “smart home” solutions for aging. He is a Member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, the Gerontological Society of America and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. He is the Editor-In-Chief of Informatics for Health and Social Care and a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics. He has conducted numerous federally funded studies and his work has been funded consistently over the years both by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). He directs the Penn Artificial Intelligence and Technology Collaboratory for Healthy Aging and is co-director of the Penn Community Collaboratory for Co-Creation.