ABOUT ME

I graduated from the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Nursing with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 2001 and have spent my entire nursing career in public health. My nursing roles have spanned providing direct care for residents of a 75-unit juvenile detention center, conducting NFP home visitation services, providing STI testing, counseling and treatment, walk-in services such as immunizations and presumptive eligibility for under-served populations, monitoring and making recommendations to improve HEDIS performance, to leading surveillance, reporting, and outbreak investigation activities.

 

In 2015 I earned a Master of Public Health with a leadership emphasis and concentrations in public health practice and epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I became board certified in advanced public health nursing in 2017. I have served as the president of the Association of Public Health Nurses, and serve actively as past president of that board and as an active member of the American Public Health Association, Public Health Nursing section. I also spent a year serving as secretary of the Quad Council for Public Health Nursing.

 

I graduated as a Doctor of Nursing Practice in Public Health Nursing from the University of Colorado Anschutz College of Nursing in December 2019, where my doctoral work, entitled “The Return on Investment of Public Health Nurses Delivering Immunization Services in Wyoming," centered on building an economic evaluation framework that will enable me and other public health nursing leaders to describe the value of public health nurses in a way that will allow them to be competitive for today’s scarce public resources.  My work won my school's Outstanding DNP Project Award. As the Chief of Public Health Nursing at the Wyoming Department of Health, I plan to continue focusing on my passion for advocating for public health nurses both statewide and nationally by continuing to build upon my doctoral work and by using my voice through national association work and social media channels.