Publishing 101 for Graduate Students: Learning the Publishing Process

Dr. Godzik is a practicing psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and postdoctoral research fellow in the Departments of Psychiatry and Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC), Centers for Aging at Dartmouth, and Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Her long-term research focus is the impact of the home sleep environment on older adult health outcomes (both psychological and physical aspects of health).

During her undergraduate education, Dr. Godzik worked alongside psychological researcher, Dr. Jamie Abaied in her family development laboratory at the University of Vermont (UVM). This laboratory experience fueled her interest to pursue a research-focused career. During this time, she also worked as an emergency medical technician, responding to 911 calls in the community, which often involved psychiatric emergencies, providing valuable insights into patients' home environments.

As a predoctoral research fellow, Dr. Godzik worked with Dr. Jacqueline Sperling in the anxiety disorders clinical laboratory where she learned to generate quantitative research hypotheses, plan and conduct data analyses, and present to a lay audience at McLean Hospital and also to professional audiences at the national American Psychiatric Nurses Association Conference.

During her doctoral education at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Dr. Godzik’s work focused on telehealth services, where she published her first, first-authored paper entitled Gateless communication: A concept analysis. Throughout her education and research endeavors, she practiced as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner in older adult psychiatric units at McLean Hospital where she was mentored by Miles Cunningham, MD, PhD, to develop treatment plans for older adult patients that included psychopharmacologic and psychotherapeutic interventions.

These experiences as an undergraduate research assistant, predoctoral research fellow, and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner have provided her with clinical insights into the challenges patients experience, particularly in older adulthood when there are significant changes in psychological and physical health including sleep (most often, insomnia or difficulty falling and staying asleep). For her postdoctoral research fellowship training, she is continuing to build on her nursing experiences to better understand the home sleep environments in older adults with insomnia. This will allow her to build a knowledge base so that she can eventually identify modifiable factors within the environment that she can intervene on in future research studies.

Dr. Varilek is an Assistant Professor with the South Dakota State University College of Nursing. He graduated in May 2020 with a PhD in Nursing and currently serves as the Chair of the GNSA Leadership Council.

He began the BSN to PhD program at South Dakota State University in August 2014 while working full time as a Transplant Coordinator. In that role, he worked primarily with post kidney and pancreas transplant recipients as well as worked to coordinate transplant surgery. During this time, Dr. Varilek participated in research exploring transplant outcomes of the center’s Indigenous population to see if there are areas where they can improve care delivery.

Dr. Varilek’s passion for research began as an undergraduate student where he co-authored his first peer-reviewed publication entitled Insights from Health Care Professionals Regarding Palliative Care Options on South Dakota Reservations. During his doctoral education, he worked with faculty mentors and other students to publish his second peer-review publication entitled A Willingness to Go There: Nurses and Spiritual Care. This research with palliative and hospice care nurses fostered a desire to pursue improving access to palliative and hospice care in rural settings. Since graduation, Dr. Varilek has had two more publications accepted for publication. He is in the process of securing grant funding to research in palliative and hospice care in rural settings.