Celebrated Students
Amid applause for the School's 13 award winning graduates in the Class of 2022 who were saluted at UVA's Final Exercises for their academic, service, leadership, and clinical excellence, came a slightly quieter but no less worthy group of celebrants.
Following are the award winners among our currently enrolled nursing students:
- Allison Bowles, RN, BSN, an MSN student
The Nancy Ballard Scholarship Award winner - Lauren Catlett, PhD student
The 2022 Graduate Teaching Award winner - Tegan Flowers, PhD student
The Barbara Parker Symposium Poster Presentation Award - Brittany Harrison, MSN, RN, CNL, a DNP student
The Phyllis J. Verhonick Clinical Research Award winner - Katherine Platz, RN, BSN, and a PhD student
The Barbara Parker Symposium Poster Presentation Award
Bowles is a Clinician 2 at UVA Health's Pediatric ICU, and completed an accelerated BSN in 2016 at Jefferson College of Health Sciences in Roanoke, VA. Currently enrolled in the pediatric nurse practitioner master's program, she is slated to graduate in 2023. She is the winner of the Nancy Ballard Scholarship Award for 2022.
Catlett is a PhD student, artist, and advocate for transgender elders whose collaboration with faculty member Cathy Campbell, associate professor and department chair, yielded a powerful case study in compassion and vision at end-of-life. A long-time volunteer for the Jefferson Area Board for Aging, Catlett worked with a transgender woman at the end of her life to write and illustrate "Little Star," a book about the elder woman's experiences, which Catlett illustrated and presented at the Virginia Festival of the Book in 2017. Catlett earned the Graduate Teaching Award for exemplifying "outstanding contributions to teaching as part of their program of study and educational experience."
Tegan Flowers, a PhD student, earned an award for her poster presentation, "Transgender and non-binary experiences with reproductive health: An integrative review," at the 2022 Barbara Parker Research Symposium.
Harrison, a DNP student, is an acute care nurse practitioner in UVA Health's Medical ICU who earned an MSN through the School's Clinical nurse Leader program. She earned the Phyllis Verhonick Clinical Research Award for her study, which is focused on improving burnout and compassion fatigue in ICU nurses.
Katie Platz, a PhD student and nurse, presented "Benefits, facilitators, and barriers of alternative models of cardiac rehabilitation: A qualitative systematic review" at the 2022 Barbara Parker Nursing Research Symposium last March. She has written about the importance of telehealth as a modality for care in the Virginia Mercury, and, for her dissertation study, is examining the impact that a live, virtual exercise program for heart failure patients had during the COVID-19 pandemic with advisor Jill Howie-Esquivel, associate professor.
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