The Year in Review: 2024-2025

“This prestigious recognition is a testament to your impact on nursing research and the lives you have touched through your work. I celebrate your achievements, the generations you have inspired, and the legacy you continue to build” said Sigman President Sandra C. Garmon Bibb in addressing the honorees.

She has been awarded the DNP Scholarship Award (2021), Presidential Award (2019) and the Literary Award (2017) from SOHN, and the Preceptor of the Year (2016) from YSN.  Wendy is passionate about the profession of nursing, the medical care of children and their families, and the education of the next generation of advanced practice nurses and health care professionals. 

As a pediatric nurse practitioner, Wendy has focused over the past 20 years on pediatric otolaryngology, with prior specialization in general pediatric surgery and trauma and pediatric pain management. She currently practices as a Nurse Practitioner at Connecticut Pediatric Otolaryngology with special interest in the care of children with airway concerns, Trisomy 21, hearing difficulties, and obstructive sleep apnea.

Professor Xiaomei Cong, PhD, RN, FAAN is now the Beatrice Renfield Professor of Nursing. She is a nursing researcher with longstanding clinical and research interests in symptoms science, including the bio-behavioral mechanisms of pain and stress and self-management of health outcomes. Her research addresses some of the most complex issues surrounding early life experience in high-risk infants and implementation of pain management strategies in vulnerable populations. 

Associate Professor Deena Costa, PhD, RN, FAAN has been named as the Helen Porter Jayne and Martha Prosser Jayne Professor of Nursing. Her experience as a critical care nurse has resulted in a research focus on optimization of the organization and management of critical care across the entire critical care team. She is dedicated to supporting all clinicians and creating an environment that optimizes their ability to provide high quality care for each mechanically ventilated patient, by examining key characteristics of, and interactions among, ICU interprofessional teams.

Associate Professor Soohyun Nam, PhD, APRN, ANP-BC, FAHA, FAAN is the newly named Gayle King Lee Associate Professor of Nursing. In addition to her YSN position, she is a faculty affiliate of the Yale Institute for Global Health. An internationally recognized expert in cardiometabolic health, health disparities, and community-engaged research, Dr. Nam brings over 25 years of clinical experience as a nurse practitioner to her research and mentorship. Her research has focused on healthcare disparities that are the outcome of structural and social determinants. 

Professor Xuehong Zhang, MBBS, MSc, ScD has been named as the Florence Wald Professor of Nursing. Dr. Zhang has an extensive record of research and publication on primary prevention and early detection of gastrointestinal diseases and cancers; advancing clinical care quality; and promoting health equity and global health. As a dedicated mentor, he takes pleasure in teaching and has actively mentored more than 30 early-career researchers at Harvard and other institutions. 

In addition to being available for discussion with students and meeting with Community Scholars, Dr. Dawes was a featured speaker of Yale University’s Illuminated for Humanity series held in Menlo Park, CA. Members of the Yale community gathered to hear about the impact of Yale.

Starting this fall, Dr. Dawes will be the keynote presence at a series of Reading for Change book club sessions that focus on his recent book, The Political Determinants of Health. Dr. Dawes has also formed relationships with YSN and other key schools at Yale in preparation for his Political Determinants of Health MSN concentration area, scheduled for launch in Spring 2026.

He plans to continue these conversations, forming relationships with The Campaign School at Yale University (TCS) and other schools such as Yale Law School, Yale School of Public Health, and Yale School of Management.

WATCH: Daniel Dawes’ presentation at For Humanity Illuminated

Lots of kids want to be a firefighter or a nurse. Christopher Hardman became both.

As a child, Hardman wanted to be a firefighter when he grew up—and he became one, then a paramedic, gaining broad experience in 911 services, inter-facility transport, and hospital-based care. He eventually flew as a paramedic with MedFlight for seven years.

As if that weren’t enough of a challenge, Hardman simultaneously earned an RN, and then a BSN, all while staying in the air. Hardman also completed an executive MBA in 2018 and an MSN in 2021. His educational journey recently culminated in a YSN doctor of nursing practice degree. He was one of 19 recent graduates of YSN’s Doctor of Nursing Program in Healthcare Leadership, Systems, and Policy.

But that’s not the end of the story. Hardman joined PHI Air Medical as a business operations manager in 2015. After being promoted to regional director and then vice president, he became chief operating officer of the company in January while completing his doctorate at YSN.

Hardman developed a structured onboarding and professional development program for emerging leaders at PHI—those with less than two years of experience in frontline supervisory roles. “From my perspective, there hasn’t been a large emphasis or value placed on education,” Hardman says. “In this industry, we take good clinicians and decide to promote them to leaders because they’re good clinicians. Oftentimes, they have little to no leadership experience or training.”

Christopher Hardman, DNP, MBA, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, NRP, CMTE, FACHE, is taking flight while helping create the future of nursing.

Laura Manzo is taking her newly minted 2025 YSN Ph.D. to her new role as a nurse-scientist in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.

While her role will be new, Manzo is a 16-year service veteran, following in the footsteps of her father who was a career officer.

Already in possession of a BSN, in 2022, Manzo decided to pursue her interest in research by pursuing doctoral education. She applied to the Yale University School of Arts & Sciences for a PhD program at the Yale School of Nursing. The military allows a maximum of three years to obtain the degree, a pace the YSN faculty were prepared to adopt. “They were so incredibly supportive of my timeline,” says Manzo.

Her dissertation focused on a critical but under-researched area: the association between perinatal mental health conditions and adverse pregnancy outcomes among active-duty servicewomen.

“What we found was that servicewomen diagnosed with mental health conditions had a significantly increased risk of preterm birth,” she says. “That gives us insight into how we can adjust clinical practice to provide targeted care, especially because military women have a higher burden of mental health conditions than civilian women.”

With her Ph.D. now in hand, Manzo will transition to a new role as a nurse-scientist at Womack Army Medical Center, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. There she’ll be doing research within the military healthcare system. “I’ve always been interested in research,” Manzo says. “This is just the beginning.”

Jordan Levandoski, DNP, MSN, APRN, FNP-BC, was one of a dozen 2025 graduates of YSN’s Clinical Nursing Practice Program. He’s focused on redefining how clinicians assess and manage cardiovascular risk, with a particular emphasis on understanding and incorporating social risk factors that have an impact on diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease.

Levandoski examined the impact of racial designation on clinical decision-making and health equity. His first step was to seek elimination of misleading race-based modifiers. He turned a spotlight on risk assessment and management, pointing out the negative impact of racial designations. “The established [cardiovascular risk estimation] tool calculates a person’s risk of having a heart attack or stroke over the next 10 years. “If you say someone is Black, it increases the risk by 5 to 7 percent,” says Levandoski. “At 8 percent, you start prescribing people medication—even if they don’t have a disease.” This has led to unnecessary burdening patients with medications they don’t need and rising healthcare costs.

“We found a new calculator that did not have race in it, and that led to more primary prevention,” Levandoski says. “What really stood out was the way to adjust risk not by giving [people] drugs but trying to create partnerships with community organizations to adjust the root causes. Health is not the absence of disease; it’s quality of life. How do you live a good life despite everything around you?” 

Now a nurse practitioner at the Clinica Family Health and Wellness Organization in Colorodo, he intends to continue using social drivers of health Z codes to support primary care and implement culturally inclusive interventions to empower health promotion in patients and communities.

Not everyone grows up wanting to be a nurse. Not everyone who enters college winds up being what they started out majoring in. Michael Backman, RN, MSN, was pursuing a degree in speech pathology when he decided that nursing was his calling.

“I was taking an anatomy and physiology course, and I fell in love with the body in its entirety and the science that made it all,” he says. “The field of nursing spoke to me.” 

Backman represented the Class of 2025 as the MSN commencement speaker in 2025. He enters the YSN Ph.D. program in the fall.  

“As I was making my way through the MSN program here, I became fascinated with research and identifying gaps in the science,” he says.  

In addition to working part-time as a registered nurse in a pediatric ENT clinic in New Haven, Backman complemented his studies by taking on assignments as research assistant to two YSN Ph.D. candidates.  

Reflecting on his journey at YSN and his message to his peers, Backman emphasizes the impact of the COVID pandemic on the class of 2025. “We are the generation of providers who saw all of that, who saw the healthcare system in crisis and still responded with a ‘yes’ to wanting to make a positive impact in patients’ lives and to resolve some of the issues that currently exist within the healthcare system. I think that makes us quite a unique and stalwart generation of providers.” 

His upcoming Ph.D. research will explore how sleep-related data and large language models can be used to detect neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.