Welcome New Nursing Faculty

Joining the School of Nursing's faculty in the spring and summer of 2023 are six new faculty members, including:

• Dawn Bourne, DNP, RN, FNP-C, HEC-C (BSN '04, MSN '10, DNP' 16), assistant professor
• Emily Evans, PhD, WHNP-BC, RN (PhD' 14)
• Christina Feggans-Langston, MSN, RN, clinical instructor and Westhaven community health nurse
• Jennifer Gaines, MSN, RN, CHSE, IBCLC, instructor and clinical simulation educator
• Susan Goins-Eplee, MSN, MDiv, RN, CNL, HEC-C
• Lee Moore, DNP, LNP, PMHNP-BC, CNE, assistant professor

Dawn Bourne, DNP, RN, FNP-C, HEC-C

Bourne is a three-time UVA alumna and former clinical instructor who joins the School as a full-time assistant professor on the general track in August 2023. A family nurse practitioner at UVA’s Student Health and Wellness Center since 2019, Dawn is well known in the School as a scholar, caregiver, and mentor. A certified healthcare ethics consultant and a member of UVA Health’s Ethics/Moral Distress Consult Service, she has been licensed to practice in Virginia since 2010 (autonomously since 2018), and has earned accolades during her nearly 20-year nursing career, including the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners’ State Award for Excellence in 2019 and the School's own Preceptor of the Year award in 2018.

Before becoming a nurse, Dawn worked at UVA Health in the Medical ICU as a patient care assistant, and, soon after graduating, quickly moved up the MICU’s nursing ranks to become a clinician III. She practiced as an FNP at Amherst Family Physicians and at Blue Ridge Medical Center before returning to work at UVA Health’s Department of Family Medicine in 2013 and joining our School as a clinical instructor in 2017. 
A former mentee of professor Beth Epstein, with whom she studied clinicians’ experiences of moral distress, Dawn is a consummate DNP, having been involved in original, on-unit investigations and being skilled at interprofessional collaborations with medical colleagues, and is an often-invited lecturer and presenter for nursing organizations across the state and region. 

Emily Evans, PhD, WHNP-BC, RN, assistant professor

Evans, an assistant professor on the general track, will be among the primary professors teaching in the new Accelerated BSN program beginning in August 2023.

A board-certified nurse practitioner and RN specializing in women’s health, Emily's UVA appointment is a homecoming. Since earning a PhD in nursing from UVA in 2014 when she was mentored by former UVA scientist Linda Bullock, she’s taught a series of graduate and undergraduate nursing courses at UVA both as a lead and co-lead faculty member and been a clinical instructor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Emily studies interventions for women who experience antepartum depression, and how, through their interactions, nurses can provide support and be a resource for them. She’s published journal articles on nursing interactions that treat antepartum depression (the subject of her doctoral dissertation), mechanisms that support rural women through pregnancy, the history of giving Mormon pioneers who gave birth on the Oregon Trail in the mid-1800s, as well as maternal mortality in global contexts.

She's worked as a nurse practitioner and registered nurse in a variety of environments—OB/GYN, women’s health, maternal child health, and labor and delivery—and locales, including Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston, Jefferson Health System in Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, Lankenau Hospital, and Pennsylvania Hospital.

Christina Feggans-Langston, MSN, RN, clinical instructor and Westhaven's community health nurse

The new Westhaven Nursing Clinic community health nurse and a clinical instructor, Feggans-Langston has worked at UVA Health since 2013 across a diversity of roles, including as a certified medical assistant and transplant coordinator assistant in UVA’s transplant clinic, as an RN on the dementia unit and in ambulatory care, and, most recently as a clinician II for patients with Hepatitis C who receive care at UVA’s Infectious Disease and Traveler’s Clinics. Currently enrolled in Mary Baldwin University’s DNP program, she earned an associate’s degree in nursing from Piedmont Virginia Community College, a BSN and an MSN from Mary Baldwin University’s nursing program, is a member of the International Transplant Nurses Society. 

Prior to this appointment, Christina was a regular volunteer at the annual Westhaven Day celebration, checking residents’ blood pressures and assisting with sports physicals, and said, “interacting with residents was an opportunity that will never be forgotten.” 

Jennifer Gaines, MSN, RN, CHSE, IBCLC

Before transitioning into teaching at the School, Gaines worked for more than 20 years at Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital as an RN and nurse educator providing direct patient care, developing plans for care for women's medical surgical cesarean deliveries and postpartum mother baby couplets and delivered postpartum mother-baby in-home visits. The regional clinical simulation educator and team coordinator at Sentara's Charlottesville and Rockingham County hospitals, she worked to train new nurses in techniques, care standards, operational procedures, and safety protocols.

A celebrated teacher, mentor, and caregiver, Gaines is a certified lactation consultant and a certified healthcare simulation educator. 

Susan Goins-Eplee, MSN, MDiv, RN, CNL, HEC-C

Goins-Eplee, a community and public health clinical instructor on the general track, was in the School's first cohort of Clinical Nurse Leader master’s program graduates and is a former clinical instructor. Prior to her appointment at the School, she worked at UVA Health where she has occupied a variety of roles since 2015: as an inpatient case manager focusing on safe hospital discharge, a clinician III in the division of general medicine, and an RN care coordinator at the Couric Cancer Center. CNL certified and clinical ethics consultant certified, she is an often-tapped speaker on topics from grief and bereavement to ethics, cancer, and end-of-life care, and, in her new role as assistant professor, she will concurrently teach and continue to serve on UVA Health’s Ethics Consultation and Moral Distress Service, where she’s worked since 1995.

Susan earned an undergraduate degree in biology and religion and planned to study medicine but instead earned a master of divinity degree and became a chaplain. Though she’d become a nurse nearly 20 years later, her time as a chaplain, as a cancer patient support services coordinator, and an ethics consultant proved seminal, providing her with a “foundational launching pad” into nursing.

Bilingual for the majority of her life and parent to an adult with special needs, Susan has also worked as a volunteer with organization from the Virginia Institute for Autism and the Special Olympics, and has a keen interest in helping broaden clinicians’, students’, and citizens’ inclusion and consideration of this important, often overlooked population. 

Lee Moore, DNP, LNP, PMHNP-BC, CNE, assistant professor

Moore is a former high school history teacher who became a nurse in 2013 and joins us from Frontier Nursing University in Kentucky where he was the psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner course coordinator and a clinical faculty member. A certified addictions nurse, Lee was a LGBT Health Policy and Practice Fellow at George Washington University, taught at the University of Washington in Seattle, St. Louis-based Maryville University, and Tusculum College in Greenville, TN, worked as a preceptor mentoring DNP students, and as an assistant in cancer research. 

In 2018, Lee opened his own practice—Better Mental Health & Wellness in Richmond—where he continues to see clients, do psychiatric evaluations, and coordinate plans of care with fellow providers. Lee earned an MSN from Vanderbilt University, a certificate from GW in LGBT health policy and practice, a DNP from Frontier Nursing University, and is currently working on a PhD in nursing from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. 

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