Nursing Ph.D. Student Takes Her Experience From the Bedside to Capitol Hill
Third-year doctoral candidate and practicing operating room nurse Merci Paulhill spent her summer with the American Nurses Association, learning how policy shapes patient care.
Merci Paulhill has spent her career trying to understand two worlds that don’t always talk to each other: the operating room and the policy room. This summer, as a Graduate Archer Fellow, she used her professional nursing experience as a bridge into shaping policy change for the future of her profession.
Paulhill, a third-year doctoral student in the School of Nursing, spent her summer in Washington, D.C., interning with the policy and government advocacy team of the American Nurses Association (ANA). The Archer Fellowship Program, founded in 2001, is the Washington, D.C., campus of the University of Texas System, giving graduate and undergraduate students across UT the chance to live, learn and intern at the heart of federal policymaking.
After graduating from UT’s School of Nursing with a BSN in December 2022, Paulhill went straight into the operating room at Ascension Seton Medical Center, where she now specializes in spine and neurosurgery. She said she always planned to return for a Ph.D. — and applied only to UT to do it.
Her research now focuses on interstitial lung disease, a condition that affects a family member. “I used to say, ‘I’ll find a cure for you,’” she recalled. Returning to school, she said, was a way to make good on a promise she had made as a kid.
That clinical and research grounding is also what pushed her toward policy. Assisting in respiratory surgical cases, where outcomes are often difficult, left her wanting to understand and help shape the rules that guide patient care before people end up in an operating room. “I got really curious about peeking behind the curtain of why we have the policies and procedures that we do,” she said.
Her interest in policy traces back further, to her final year as an undergraduate student. A public health nursing course challenged students to write and deliver a legislative testimony, and Paulhill’s cohort took theirs to the Texas Capitol. Hers argued for eliminating the state sales tax on menstrual products. The bill eventually passed after Paulhill was already a working nurse. Getting that news, she said, was what first showed her how directly policy could touch the profession she’d just entered. It’s an experience she points to as the spark for pursuing the fellowship.
In Washington, Paulhill worked directly with the ANA’s senior policy adviser, Alison Hernandez, on a small, close-knit team she described as doing the work of a much larger office. Her days ranged widely: reviewing legislation for ANA support, listening to congressional hearings and lobbying on Capitol Hill. She also had a hand in planning the organization’s annual Membership Assembly, which brings together nurses from every state to debate priorities and shape the future of nursing.
The fellowship’s academic component pushed her thinking as much as the internship did. In a course called “Inside Washington,” taught by longtime Archer faculty member Bill Shute, Paulhill and her cohort studied the executive, judicial and legislative branches not as static institutions but as systems shaped by history. Iconic locations across Washington became the cohort’s classroom. One of Paulhill’s most notable memories is a class session held at sunset by the Tidal Basin, where each student read one of the 27 grievances from the Declaration of Independence aloud and debated whether it had been resolved in the modern day. “It didn’t feel like class so much as it felt like stepping back into history,” she said.
Surrounded by classmates from wildly different backgrounds in nationality, age and area of study, Paulhill learned to appreciate how much learning happens outside the classroom. “It wasn’t like I was learning from the instructor solely. I was learning from my own classmates,” she said.
She hasn’t ruled out a return to Washington down the line. For now, the fellowship has given her a broader lens for the work she’s already doing. Her immediate focus remains her dissertation and building strong research skills. She continues her work as a graduate research assistant in UT’s Multiple Sclerosis Research Lab and as a teaching assistant for undergraduate nursing research courses.
Paulhill expects to finish her Ph.D. in May 2028 and said the Archer experience will stay with her well beyond graduation. The experience has shaped how she thinks about her research’s place in the bigger picture: not just treating illness but also understanding the systems that could prevent it.
