Connell’s newest faculty members

“I believe the goal of health care should be human flourishing. During my doctoral program, I focused on developing a conceptual framework of flourishing—or complete well-being—in adolescents and young adults with cancer. I believe flourishing individuals tend to make positive impacts on their surroundings and evoke other people’s well-being. My research found that nurses are well positioned to promote flourishing in this population. I designed a dyadic nurse-patient storytelling intervention [where each shares their life story] to find meaning in their relationship. Eventually, I want to implement this storytelling idea in clinical and community settings and help young people move forward after cancer diagnosis and treatment. I also love teaching, and I want to help students develop their own ways toward flourishing.”

“I’ve always been a teacher. After graduating from midwifery school, my first job was teaching labor and delivery skills in Haiti. My experience working in Haiti and with the Haitian immigrant population here is that we have worse outcomes in maternity care. I want to understand why, and what the health care system can do to improve them. I immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti, and I have personally experienced poor maternity outcomes, having lost my baby at 24 weeks. My doctoral research at Boston Medical Center found that Haitian immigrant women face lots of barriers to good maternity care. They need help with social determinants of health, like transportation, housing, childcare, and access to insurance. They appreciate having a provider who speaks their language or is from their culture. And they appreciate respectful care.”

“I hope to bring more technology into nursing to better serve our patients and profession. Nurses need to be able to understand patient health data. By using tools from data and computer science, one can ask and answer important questions that can drive nursing research and practice. Another passion of mine is adolescent psychiatry. My D.N.P. clinical research project involved implementing a trauma-informed care protocol in an inpatient adolescent psychiatric setting. I helped mental health techs understand that their patients were not misbehaving children, but rather young people who had suffered trauma, often severe. The patients wanted help, acceptance, and love but didn’t know how to ask. Building therapeutic relationships through compassionate care, mutual trust and respect, and active listening is basic nursing—and really all that was needed.”

“I like to tell my students, ‘You can apply epidemiology skills to basically any public health problem you want.’ I think most people understand, because of COVID, that epidemiology is everywhere. I’m excited to show them case studies, have them do group projects on diseases or conditions they’re interested in, and dive into the literature to understand how incidence and prevalence, risk factors, and study design all come into play to shape clinical knowledge. I think nurses need “epi” knowledge to inform what happens in the clinic. Knowledge is always changing, and knowing how to read a journal article—including the methods section—is a skill everybody should have. You’ve got to know how to interpret and apply the research.”

“Ethics underlies everything we do as nurses. My clinical background got me interested in ethics, because as a critical care nurse, you see lots of complicated situations around end-of-life decision making and disagreements over the right thing to do for the patient. Those situations left me with a feeling of moral distress. These issues come up incredibly often, but we [clinicians, patients, families] typically don’t realize we have an ethical problem until it is a crisis. I’m passionate about helping nurses develop ethical awareness so we can identify ethical dilemmas earlier and take action to resolve them: ‘I see this patient situation is ripe for conflict, and I’m going to intervene early so we prevent it from escalating and make sure we provide the best possible care.’”

“I’m interested in the therapeutic relationship between patient and nurse. That theme has cut across my research, whether it’s been with individuals with persistent and severe mental illness, autism, or mood disorders. We can’t underestimate the importance of the therapeutic relationship. That’s how growth and change happen. I’m especially interested in understanding, from a nursing perspective, the impact of telepsychiatry on that relationship—because you’re not seeing the whole person. But telepsychiatry has helped bridge the gap for rural and underserved populations, and of course, helped during the pandemic. There’s been a drive to take away the stigma of saying you have a mental illness or are seeing a therapist, which is just wonderful.”