Posted: 12/15/2010
Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing (JHUSON) faculty member and chair person of the Department of Acute and Chronic Care Marie T. Nolan, PhD, MPH, RN, has been promoted to the rank of Professor.
Nolan, who has served on the JHUSON faculty since 2001 notes, “I am grateful for this honor and look forward to working with the staff and faculty in my department and continuing my healthcare decision-making research here at Hopkins with colleagues in the Schools of Nursing, Medicine, and Public Health.”
Her research focuses on patient and family healthcare decision-making at the end of life and on decisions regarding living organ donation, key issues in both clinical care and bioethics. Nolan’s pioneering end-of-life research has advanced the understanding of patients’ preferences for shared decision making with family and physician and has called into question the autonomous decision making model on which advance care planning health policy is based.
Fannie Gaston-Johansson, PhD, RN, FAAN, the former chairperson of the Department of Acute and Chronic Care, describes Nolan as, “An international leader in research on patient and family healthcare decision making at the end of life and in advancing doctoral education in nursing globally.”
Nolan currently leads a five-year study funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research at the National Institutes for Health testing a brief clinic-based intervention to prepare family members of patients with terminal illness for their possible future role as proxy decision makers. Other investigators on the study include JHUSON faculty members Joan Kub, PhD, APHN, BC and Linda Rose, PhD, RN, Richard Thomas and Gayane Yenokyan from the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Mark Hughes and Peter Terry from the School of Medicine.
Nolan previously was director of the Schools PhD program and currently serves as the director of the China Doctoral Program Partnership, a collaboration between Peking Union Medical College and JHUSON, funded by the China Medical Board of Boston, which produced the first nursing PhD graduates from a Chinese university in 2008. She is an Advisory Board Member of the International Nursing Doctoral Education Network. Nolan holds a joint faculty appointment in the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and has served on advisory panels of the National Institutes of Health regarding end-of-life care research.