Janice Phillips named spring 2023 commencement speaker
Phillips received 1999 UIC Nursing Distinguished Alumna Award, among other professional honors Heading link
Janice Phillips, PhD ‘93, RN, CENP, FAAN, director of Nursing Research and Health Equity at Rush University Medical Center, was selected as the UIC College of Nursing Spring 2023 commencement speaker.
The UIC College of Nursing spring 2023 commencement will be held on May 4 at 2 p.m. at Credit Union 1 Arena.
Phillips is an experienced clinician, researcher, educator, public policy advocate and regulator in the health care arena. The author of more than 150 publications and five edited textbooks, she served as the inaugural health policy columnist of Minority Nurse Magazine.
Among the more than 60 professional and community recognitions and awards she’s received, Phillips was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award, the National Black Nurses Association Lifetime Achievement Award and the Power of Nursing Leadership SAGE Award. Phillips was the 1999 recipient of the UIC College of Nursing Distinguished Alumna Award.
In her role at Rush, Phillips serves as a leader in advancing health equity goals across Rush System of Health’s education, research, and clinical spaces. Phillips was featured in Johnson & Johnson’s “Starting the Conversation,” a series of online video discussions with Black doctors and nurses on the front lines of health equity that aired in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Phillips experienced homelessness and lack of access to health care growing up on the South Side of Chicago. She credits her mentors and supporters for her career trajectory, and she has made it a point to “pay it back” as a mentor herself, including with UIC Nursing’s Alumni Mentor Program.
“My journey in nursing began during my senior year in high school when Anna Mae Earles, my Illinois Department of Children and Family Services appointed social worker smiled and said ‘you have potential.’” Phillips said in a profile posted to Rush’s website. “She made it her business that I get into college although my hopes of attending college were dim at that time in my life.”
Phillips overcame those ‘dim’ prospects to go on to work in a wide range of teaching, research and policy roles, including oncology, public health, women’s health, health care disparities and research administration. She completed her PhD at UIC Nursing with a dissertation on adherence to breast cancer screening guidelines among African American women.
She served as a program director of the National Institute of Nursing Research and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow, working in the office of Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV.
While at Rush, Phillips has continued her advocacy work, writing numerous op-eds for publications including The Hill, World News Report and Morning Consult as a participant in the Public Voice Fellowship.