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
PHNS overview Heading link
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.
Our department is home to these academic programs: Heading link
Meet the department head Heading link
Janna Stephens, PhD, RN
Department Head
Department of Population Health Nursing Scienc
