By Trinity Higgins
New Haven Promise Scholar
Yale School of Nursing (YSN) is delighted to celebrate 4 members of the faculty as new fellows of the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM): Laura Andrews, PhD, APRN, ACNP-BC, Dean Azita Emami, PhD, MSN, BSN, RNT, RN, FAAN, Alison Moriarty Daley, PhD, APRN, PPCNP-BC, FAAN, and Christine Rodriguez, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC, MDiv, MA, FNYAM.
NYAM fellows are saluted as top practitioners and academic and policy makers within their fields which span nursing, medicine, social work, public health, administration, health policy, pharmacy, dentistry, law and government.
Laura Andrews, PhD, APRN, ACNP-BC
Chair, Graduate Entry Prespeciality in Nursing (GEPN)
Dr. Andrews obtained her BSN and a minor in biology from Saint Joseph College, where she received the Florence Nightingale Nursing Award for academic excellence and community service. She received her MSN and her PhD from UCONN. Her doctoral research program consisted of studies related to critical care nurses and end of life care, the lived experience of new acute care nurse practitioners and home care of heart failure patients. Her doctoral dissertation was the development and psychometric testing of an instrument to assess critical care nurses’ level of comfort in withdrawing life-supportive therapies in adult patients for which she received the Beverly Koerner Research Award from Sigma Theta Tau: Iota Upsilon Chapter-at-Large.
Azita Emami, PhD, MSN, BSN, RNT, RN, FAAN
Dean
Linda Koch Lorimer Professor of Nursing
Dr. Emami joined YSN as Dean in 2023. She is an active researcher, an international advocate for expanding nursing’s role in primary care, and a powerful voice for global equity of healthcare access. Dean Emami serves as a trustee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and on several professional boards and committees. She was a U.S. leader of the international Nursing Now initiative, a three-year global campaign (2018-2020) in collaboration with the International Council of Nurses and the World Health Organization that raised the visibility, status, and education opportunities of nurses worldwide. She also led the U.S. “Year of the Nurse and the Midwife” effort (2021), part of a global U.N. initiative.
Equity of opportunity in nursing education is a focal point for Dean Emami, who has been a national leader in developing efforts directed at making diversity, equity and inclusion a priority at schools of nursing. She initiated creation of the nation’s first Center for Antiracism in Nursing and has written and spoken in numerous professional settings about the ways in which both patients and the profession benefit from understanding and addressing implicit bias and historical racism.
Alison Moriarty Daley ’94 MSN, PhD, APRN, PPCNP-BC
Chair, MSN Program
Dr. Daley is jointly appointed as a Professor at Yale School of Nursing and the Yale-New Haven Hospital Adolescent Clinic. She is the Chair of the Master in Science Nursing program and a member of and Specialty Director for the Pediatric Nurse Practitioner (PNP) specialty. Dr. Moriarty Daley teaches primary care of adolescents and the clinical course clinical practice in the primary care of adolescents. In her role as a PNP, she is the coordinator and clinician at the Hill-Regional Career School-Based Clinic and clinician at the adolescent clinic.
Christine Rodriguez, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC, MDiv, MA, FNYAM
Assistant Dean for Simulation and Clinical Innovation
Having served as a healthcare chaplain and practitioner, Dr. Rodriguez was placed in the quintessential position to understand her patient’s needs by utilizing a biopsychosociospiritual framework. Such an approach amplified the inequities and disparities that are depicted within the healthcare system and religious/spiritual communities, specifically for folx of color. As an Afro-Indigenous scholar, her own lived experiences and this framework, allows her to relentlessly strive to advocate for the dismantling of the systemic oppressive ideologies found within our everyday lives.