Three faculty members in the School of Nursing at The University of Texas at Austin have been inducted as Fellows of the American Academy of Nursing, one of the highest honors in nursing.
Dr. Mary Lou Adams, Dr. Marilyn Pattillo and Dr. Deborah Volker were among 143 new fellows from around the world. The 2011 class was inducted Oct. 15 in Washington, D.C., at the academy’s annual meeting.
The academy, composed of about 1,500 nursing leaders in education, management, practice and research, selects fellows to recognize efforts in advancing the profession of nursing.
Adams, an associate professor of clinical nursing, has focused on health-promotion behaviors of women, particularly minority women and underserved populations. She developed a model program to increase mammograms for members of minority communities that has since been extended to 18 communities and two state health departments in the United States.
Pattillo, an associate professor in clinical nursing, has worked in disaster nursing and geriatric advance practice nursing, including more than 20 years in the Air Force Nurse Corps. Pattillo developed and taught two disaster nursing elective classes that have been integrated into the undergraduate curriculum so that all students have basic disaster nursing competencies before graduation. She has helped schools of nursing in the U.S. and abroad to develop their disaster nursing response skill competencies.
The research interests of Volker, an associate professor of nursing, center around ethical dilemmas and decisions that adults with cancer, their families and nurses experience within the context of terminal illness. Her recent study of patient control, ethnicity and end-of-life care, funded by the National Institutes of Health, explored the nature of what patients with advanced cancer want regarding personal control and comfort at the end of life.
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