Marie Nolan: School of Nursing Faculty Directory

Overview

"In critical illness, our support for patient decision making preferences within the family is essential to respecting the integrity of the human person."

Dr. Marie T. Nolan is internationally renowned for her work on patient and family decision making in the face of critical illness. Her research focuses on the decision-making process at the end of life and on decisions regarding living organ donation, key issues in both clinical care and bioethics. Her pioneering end-of-life research has revealed that instead of the autonomous decision making model prevalent in clinical practice and health care policy, most critically ill patients prefer shared decision making with their family and physician. At Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, Dr. Nolan chairs the Department of Acute and Chronic Care. She also previously directed the PhD program and is the Johns Hopkins Director for the first nursing doctoral program in China, a collaboration between Peking Union Medical College and the School funded by the China Medical Board of New York. She is also Advisory Board Member of the International Nursing Doctoral Education Network. Dr. Nolan holds a joint faculty appointment in the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, is the Evaluation Core Director for the School Center for Collaborative Intervention Research, and has served on advisory panels of the National Institutes of Health regarding end-of-life care research. Widely published in the nursing and multidisciplinary research literature, Dr. Nolan has edited two books, Measuring Patient Outcomes (2000) and Transplantation Nursing: Acute and Long-term Management (1995).

Areas of Scholarly Expertise and Interest

Patient and family decision making in serious illness; end-of-life decision making; living organ donor decision making.