Welcoming Five New Assistant Professors
Joel R. Anderson begins in his new role as an assistant professor and co-director of the Wisdom & Wellbeing program, effective August 1, 2025 while the School’s inaugural cohort of post-doctoral research fellows - Alanna Bergman, Crystal Chu, Victoria Petermann, and Maria McDonald - officially become assistant professors Aug. 25, 2025.
Joel R. Anderson (MSN ’08, PhD ’22) joins the School as co-director of the Wisdom & Wellbeing program, with Ann Kellams, MD, and as an assistant professor, succeeding Richard Westphal. Across his more than 25 years at UVA Health University Medical Center, he’s led strategic initiatives to enhance patient experience, safety, and care quality, developed formal nursing leadership positions that promote nurses’ professionalism, and taught and mentored CNL master’s students during their capstone projects.
Alanna Bergman, who’s been mentored by associate professor Emma Mitchell for the past year, studies the impact of infectious disease stigma on care engagement and quality of life in global settings. Her research spans stigma reduction, health equity, and social determinants of infectious disease outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil. She is an infectious disease nurse practitioner and sees people living with HIV in UVA's Ryan White Clinic and abroad and has clinical experience treating people with opiate use disorder. She earned an NINR F31 grant during her doctoral training and is an associate editor for the Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care.
Crystal Chu (BSN ’15, PhD ’23) is a former oncology nurse who, with mentors Randy Jones, associate dean, and breast surgeon Lynn Dengel, MD, created, deployed, and tested a novel decision-making tool for women considering contralateral prophylactic mastectomy when they have breast cancer on just one side. Over the past two years, Chu created additional decision-making tools for breast cancer patients across the clinical spectrum that explore risk tolerance, clinical versus economic decision making, and decisional conflict.
Maria McDonald’s (PhD ’23) observations of transgenerational depression led her to investigate whether synthetic oxytocin caused subtle changes in the brain and blood that put women and their babies at greater risk for depression. Though she began her research using animal models, she’s spent the last two years using population-level data derived from human mothers and broadened the scope of research from the oxytocin system to a bio-psychosocial framework for maternal mental health, with mentors Jeanne Alhusen, associate dean for research, and Jennifer Payne, from the School of Medicine’s psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences department.
Victoria Petermann studies what factors contribute to delays in diagnosis of gynecological cancers, like endometrial cancer—which impacts about 66,000 people a year, and results in more than 12,500 deaths annually. Over the past two years, she has also worked with mentor Virginia LeBaron, the Kluge-Schakat Associate Professor of Compassionate Care, and others to understand how patients with advanced cancer manage their pain in the home and examine barriers to accessing opioids for cancer pain management.
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