Johns Hopkins School of Nursing Professor and Endowed Chair Cynda Rushton, PhD, MSN, RN, FAAN, has been selected to receive the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) Marguerite Rodgers Kinney Award for a Distinguished Career. The award recognizes Rushton’s exceptional contributions that further AACN’s mission and vision and her career-long work that has enhanced the care of critically ill patients and families.
“To be honored by AACN in Margarite Kinney’s distinguished legacy is both humbling and thrilling,” says Rushton.
“My career has been blessed beyond measure through my long-standing collaboration with AACN and the inspiring and courageous critical care nurses who serve across America every day.”
Rushton is an internationally recognized researcher in the areas of bioethics, ethics education, and the moral suffering of clinicians. In her most recent work, Rushton is serving as the chief synergy strategist for Maryland’s R3 Resilient Nurses Initiative. The initiative seeks to renew, retain, and amplify the integrity and resilience of nurses, students, and nursing educators across Maryland, in all specialties and roles, through a culture of ethical practice.
In 2014, Rushton co-led the first National Nursing Ethics Summit and the production of the “Blueprint for 21st Century Nursing Ethics.” She has co-led a national collaborative State of the Science Initiative: Transforming Moral Distress into Moral Resilience in Nursing, co-chaired an American Nurses Association panel on ethical practice, and served on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine committee to develop recommendations for systemic solutions to combating clinician burnout. Rushton is editor and author of the book Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering
in Healthcare.
Rushton’s career has been recognized through numerous awards and leadership positions. She is the Anne and George L. Bunting Professor of Clinical Ethics at JHSON and the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. In 2019, she received the Sigma Daniel J. Pesut Spirit of Renewal Award and was inducted into the Sigma International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame.
Rushton is a member of the American Nurses Association’s Center for Ethics and Human Rights Ethics Advisory Board and the American Nurses Foundation’s Well-Being Initiative Advisory Board. She is a Robert Wood Johnson nurse executive fellow and a fellow of the Hastings Center and the American Academy of Nursing.