Your gift will support these fundraising goals:
- Endow the Dean’s Position: $5 million
- Endow Chairs: $2.5 million
- Endow Professorships: $1 million
Faculty Excellence
Attracting and retaining the best nurse scientists, educators, and clinicians.
The University of Maryland School of Nursing excels because of the expertise and leadership of our faculty. Every day, our faculty educate students and inspire them to become future nursing professionals and leaders in health care.
There is no better incentive for attracting and retaining the best scholars, researchers, and teachers than an endowed professorship, position, or chair. More than just conferring honor, endowed professorships and chairs recognize and support the work of our outstanding faculty by providing them with critical resources needed to launch, sustain, and expand promising research and innovative clinical initiatives.
By making a generous gift to endow our professorships and chairs, you can help bring together the world’s leading experts and the brightest students and support their collaboration and innovations. Endowing the dean’s position is an investment in the school's future. Through your gift, you can ensure quality education for our students and create nursing programs of excellence.
The Impact of Your Gift to Support Faculty Excellence
Promoting Health Careers
Vanessa Fahie, PhD ’94, MS ’83, BSN ’76, RN, assistant professor (pictured, far left), wants to help Baltimore high school students ease their transition to college and career upon graduation. She leads a team from the School of Nursing to visit schools in West Baltimore and introduce students to various health careers.
Through the College Preparation Intervention Program, Dr. Fahie provides sophomores in the Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) cohort at Edmondson-Westside and Frederick Douglass high schools and their parents with college awareness and readiness resources and services.
Confronting the Opioid Epidemic
According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, drug overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the U.S., with 52,404 lethal drug overdoses in 2015. The same year alone, there were 20,101 deaths from overdoses related to opioid pain medication in the U.S.
"I have never seen anything of this magnitude before," says Katherine Fornili, DNP ’16, MPH, RN, CARN, FIAAN, assistant professor (pictured).
With colleague Charon Burda, DNP ’16, MS ’03, PMHCNS, PMHNP-BC, CARN-AP, assistant professor, Dr. Fornili is preparing students to communicate with patients in all decision-making and treatment goals, focusing on the known risks and realistic benefits of opioid therapy. She’s supervising undergraduate students through 500 hours of direct patient care regarding safe, effective prescribing practices consistent with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest guidelines and other national standards.