Faculty

Dr. Marianne Adam is an associate teaching professor and the campus coordinator of nursing at Penn State Schuylkill. Her research interests are diabetes, chronic illness, patient education/learning, community-based health promotion and programming, the substance/heroin epidemic, and qualitative research.

Dr. Rachel Allen is an assistant research professor of nursing, family psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, Jonas Nurse Leader Scholar, and Fellow at the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on psychiatric nursing, nursing history, mental health policy, and the broad social history of deinstitutionalization. Dr. Allen's research contains both a chronic illness and community focus, centering on individuals living with serious and persistent mental illness.

Dr. Marie Boltz's teaching interests include clinical gerontology, research, and age- and dementia-friendly health care systems. Her areas of research include interventions to promote functional health, cognition in older adults, approaches to support family and formal caregiving efficacy, and coping with dementia and delirium, organizational models to address complex aging-related care issues, and translational dementia research.

Dr. Michael Evans, assistant dean of undergraduate nursing education at Penn State campuses and associate teaching professor of nursing, teaches in the BSN, RN to BSN, and graduate-level programs (DNP). His research interests center around palliative and end-of-life care and improving the quality of life for persons living with chronic progressive illnesses.

Dr. Donna M. Fick is the director of the Hartford Center of Geriatric Nursing Excellence at Penn State. She is an instructor for a variety of graduate nursing courses. Dr. Fick's research interests include inappropriate medication use in older adults, recognition and management of delirium superimposed on dementia, and implementation of ultra-brief delirium screening in hospital settings.

Dr. Sharilee Hrabovsky is an assistant research professor, teaching online courses in the Graduate School. A practicing nurse for the more than three decades, many of them as a nurse practitioner, she has presented on tobacco use, treatment, and regulation research for the last several years. As a Nationally Certified Tobacco Treatment Specialist, she has worked with hundreds of tobacco users through clinical trials or direct patient care in their quest to reduce or quit tobacco use.

Dr. Ying-Ling Jao is an assistant professor of nursing. Her areas of research are dementia and long-term care. Her program of research focuses on the impact of the care environment and caregiver communication on behavioral symptoms for people with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias in long-term care. Dr. Jao is also a faculty member of the Center of Geriatric Nursing Excellence.

Dr. Lisa Kitko is the associate dean for graduate education and an associate professor. Her program of research focuses on palliative care, heart failure, and the needs of family caregivers. She has spearheaded the College of Nursing's efforts to enhance nursing education for minority students. She has taught a variety of medical-surgical nursing and clinical nurse specialist courses and currently teaches pathophysiology.

Dr. Susan Loeb's program of research focuses on the health needs and issues of older inmates with chronic health conditions, including those with advanced chronic illnesses who are approaching the end of life. Her research has been funded by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Nursing Research. Over the past two decades, Dr. Loeb has taught a wide array of courses across the nursing curriculum, from undergraduate through doctoral education. Most recently, her teaching has been in writing-focused courses where students develop their scholarly papers or dissertations. In addition, she regularly teaches NURS 501: Issues in Nursing and Health Care.

Dr. Sheri Matter is the director of the online MSN program and is an assistant teaching professor in the Penn State College of Nursing. She has more than 30 years of nursing leadership experience, including serving as chief nursing executive of a multiple hospital system. Dr. Matter's research for her dissertation focused on the nurse characteristics of a highly reliable organization.

Dr. Cara E. Rice is an infectious disease epidemiologist, focusing on health disparities affecting sexual and gender minority populations, with an emphasis on sexual health (specifically HIV and other sexually transmitted infections) and substance use. She has extensive experience in survey data collection, data analysis, and working with high-risk populations, and she is passionate about the examination of diseases in their entirety, including biological, sociological, and epidemiological factors.

Dr. Britney Wardecker is an assistant professor in the College of Nursing at Penn State. Prior to her faculty position, Dr. Wardecker began training (funded by the National Institutes of Health) as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Healthy Aging at Penn State. Her research examines lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) older adults' psychological and physical health outcomes. Dr. Wardecker also loves to teach in the areas of health, discrimination, health disparities, and research methods.

Dr. Kelly Wolgast teaches both nurse administrator/management courses and nurse educator courses in Penn State's MSN and DNP Programs. Her research interests includes nurse leadership, health care delivery models, distance learning, and military/veterans' health.

Dr. Andrea Yevchak Sillner is an assistant research professor in the Penn State College of Nursing and a board-certified gerontological clinical nurse specialist. Dr. Sillner's research interests are in improving transitions of care for older adults and their informal family caregivers, by focusing on technology-assisted communication and preferences of care.