Department of Population Health Nursing Science

Dedicated to scholarship focused on multilevel determinants of health and translating this research to improve the health of individuals, families, communities, organizations and populations

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Research and Scholarship

Faculty and students in the department of Population Health Nursing Science, formerly the Department of Health Systems Science, receive funding from the National Institutes of Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Health Resources and Services Administration, and other foundations and agencies that support the conduct of leading-edge research in areas such as:

Social determinants of obesity in urban populations
Identity impairments as cognitive vulnerabilities for adolescent risk behavior
Health disparities among sexual-minority individuals
Smoking cessation in LGBT populations
Symptoms and health behaviors in cancer survivors
Multilevel determinants of children’s chronic conditions, such as asthma, in ethnic minority and immigrant populations
Developing and testing new models of care delivery
Technology interventions to improve and measure care coordination and clinical efficiency
Evidence-based practice in public health nursing
Competency and image of the public health nursing workforce
Social media as a health promotion and disease prevention strategy
Data mining and statistical analysis of EHR data to generate new nursing knowledge
Transforming evidence-based nursing knowledge into clinical decision support tools for use at the point of care
Interprofessional education, simulation and technology to enhance chronic care population management

Academic Programs

Our department advances research and scholarship on multilevel determinants of health—psychosocial, behavioral, environmental, systems—and translates this work into practice, care delivery, and policy to improve the health of individuals, families, communities, organizations and populations.

Graduates of our doctoral nurse practitioner programs become authoritative family and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners. In the case of our DNP degrees in advanced population health and health systems leadership and informatics, our graduates go on to roles as health systems leaders. Our PhD candidates graduate, prepared to expand the universe of nursing research and to educate the next generation of nurses and nurse scientists.

The department also offers the School Nurse Certificate Program to prepare bachelor’s prepared registered nurses to become school nurse leaders.