Speakers

Gail Armstrong, PhD, DNP, ACNS-BC, CNE, FAAN
Professor, Assistant Dean of the DNP Program
Oregon Health & Science University

Dr. Gail Armstrong received her BA from Bates College, her Nursing Doctorate, MSN and DNP from the University of Colorado, and her PhD from Vanderbilt University. Well known as an exceptional educator, Gail’s career in higher education has included teaching and curricular development in pre-licensure, Master’s Degree and DNP Programs. Gail’s clinical practice began at the bedside as Med/Surg nurse, then as an Adult Clinical Nurse Specialist, and more recently was focused on the area of quality and safety. Gail’s academic and practice career has focused on inspiring and leading health professionals to integrate healthcare systems improvement into their practice. Gail’s scholarly contributions include developing groundbreaking, specific strategies for early and sustained integration of the IOM/NAM competencies into pre-licensure curricula, which challenged decades-old models of curricular progression. Gail is the primary author of Leadership and Systems Improvement for the DNP, a 2020 text that offers leadership and systems improvement content for DNP nursing clinical leaders.

Speaker

Gwen Sherwood, PhD, RN, FAAN, ANEF
Professor Emeritus
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Dr. Gwen D. Sherwood was a Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing. Her program of scholarship evolved from a model for caring relationships which led to examination of patient satisfaction with pain management, particularly from a multicultural perspective and the development of a Spanish Language tool, the Houston Pain Outcome Instrument. She also applied the caring model to spiritual dimensions of care and the impact on healthy work environments and helped develop the Methodist Caring Tool to examine patient satisfaction with caring. Through her work at the University of Texas at Houston School of Nursing she was co-investigator with the Medical School’s Center for Patient Safety to examine teamwork as a variable in patient safety.

Dr. Sherwood is co-investigator on Phases I, II, III, and IV of the award winning Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to transform nursing curriculum to prepare nurses in quality and safety for redesigned health care systems. She was a nursing leader for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University Inter-professional Patient Safety Education Collaborative to measure effectiveness of teaching modalities for interdisciplinary teamwork training involving nursing and medical students. She participates in the annual Telluride Science Institute on interprofessional education with the University of Illinois at Chicago and is a member of the National Patient Safety Foundation Research Committee. She has been a leader in developing nursing education across borders, working with nursing faculty in China, Thailand, Macau, Mexico, England, and Kenya.

She is Past President of the International Association for Human Caring and served two terms as Vice President of Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society for Nursing.

Speakers

Margaret Rauschenberger, MSN, RN
Professor, Dean of Nursing Emerita, and Associate Dean
School of Adult Learning and New Initiatives
Alverno College

Peg Rauschenberger, MSN, RN, is an associate dean in the School of Adult Learning and New Initiatives in charge of health related programming, and the dean emerita of Alverno College's JoAnn McGrath School of Nursing and Health Professions. She has been consulting and lecturing since 1997, and has presented numerous workshops nationally and internationally on topics including ability-based education, nursing education, child and adolescent mental health care, nursing in corrections, conflict resolution, stress management and the effects of stress on health.

Judeen Schulte, PhD, RN
Professor
JoAnn McGrath School of Nursing and Health Professions
Alverno College

Judeen Schulte, PhD, OSF, is a professor of Nursing at Alverno College where she has taught since 1980. In addition to her nursing expertise, Schulte has given presentations on Alverno’s abilities-based curriculum across the country, as well as around the world. She has also served as a consultant to several universities here and abroad on performance assessment, student learning and abilities-based curricula.

Ann Van Eerden, MSN, MS, RN
Associate Professor
JoAnn McGrath School of Nursing and Health Professions
Alverno College

Ann Van Eerden, MSN, MS, RN, CNE, NCSN, is an associate professor of nursing in the JoAnn McGrath School of Nursing and Health Profe ssions at Alverno College. She also serves as the director of both the Undergraduate Nursing Program and the Health Education Program. She has nearly 40 years of nursing experience and has been teaching since 2008.

Speaker

Colleen Leners, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC, FAAN FAANP
Director of Policy
American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN)

Dr. Colleen Leners is the Director of Policy at the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), which serves as the national voice of academic nursing. Dr. Leners was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow in the office of Senator John Thune (R-SD) of the Senate Finance Committee. She has maintained an active family nurse practitioner practice for over 25 years and has served our country in the United States Army Nurse Corps, which after multiple deployments overseas was honorably discharged. She has many notable achievements both civilian and military, she has been inducted as a Fellow Academy of Nursing, Fellow in the American Association of Nurse Practitioners and awarded the Bronze Star for her service overseas.

Dr. Leners has served as the Traumatic Brain Injury Program manager, created a nurse-managed primary care clinic for Wounded Warriors at Navy Medical Center San Diego. She has also been a registered nurse and nurse practitioner for three decades. She received her DNP in Leadership from Case Western Reserve University, MSN FNP from University of San Diego and her BSN from California State University Dominguez Hills.