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
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:
Meet the department head
Colleen Corte, PhD, RN, FAAN
Associate Professor
Director of the PhD Program
Colleen Corte has been an educator and researcher since 2004. In addition to serving as Department Head, she is also director of the PhD program.
Her talents as a teacher and a mentor to her doctoral students led to her receipt of a UIC Teaching Recognition Program award in 2016 and the UIC Graduate College Mentoring award in 2017.
In her own reserach, Corte addresses prevention of the development of alcohol use disorders by inhibiting the formation of a “drinker identity”—a powerful predictor of alcohol use of which she has found evidence in children as young as 9 years old. Corte most recently extended her research to focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people because of their higher prevalence of heavy drinking and alcohol problems.
Corte is a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and has received accolades and awards from the International Nurses Society on Addictions, the Midwest Nursing Research Society and the Research Society on Alcoholism.
