After more than 21 years of dedicated service, Melinda Rose retired as the director of the Johns Hopkins Nursing Alumni Association this past September. To recognize her many years of service and dedication to alumni and students, JHNAA members voted to name Melinda Rose an honorary alumna at the Alumni Meeting on September 24 and presented her with the Maltese Cross pin of Marion Watts, Class of 1899.
Rose is the second honorary alumna to receive Watts’s pin. Watts, who was known for her public health work and for establishing the Santa Barbara (CA) Visiting Nurse Association, became the assistant to Elizabeth Gordon Fox, American Red Cross public health nursing director, in 1919. After Watts’s death in 1940, the pin was given to School of Nursing friend and donor, Louise Cavagnaro, when she became an honorary JHNAA member in 1998. Rose had a fond relationship with “Cavi” until Cavagnaro’s death in June 2010. Rose was honored that the pin had belonged to two exemplary JHNAA members.