Jeanette Lancaster, PhD, RN, FAAN
President

Dr. Jeanette Lancaster was elected by representatives from AACN member institutions to serve a two-year term as AACN President through March 2008. In 1989, Dr. Jeanette Lancaster became Dean and Sadie Heath Cabaniss Professor of Nursing at the University of Virginia where she now enjoys the longest tenure of any current dean. Her role as a practice leader and as Associate Director of Clinical Services at the UVA Medical Center provides the opportunity to maintain an understanding of current trends, issues, and challenges in health care and she is recognized as a national and international authority on community health nursing, nursing education and leadership, and public policy. In March 2006, she will become President of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), the national organization setting standards and advocating for nursing baccalaureate and higher degree education. Dr. Lancaster is a Fellow in the prestigious American Academy of Nursing.

It seems fitting that the educator who holds the first endowed nursing professorship in the United States (established in 1928) was herself honored in 1999 with the first endowed professorship named for a female Dean at the University of Virginia: the Jeanette Lancaster Alumni Professorship in Nursing. She has been honored as a distinguished alumna at the University of Tennessee College of Nursing and the Francis Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University and was named honorary alumna at the UVA School of Nursing. In 2004, the New York University Division of Nursing presented her with the Maes-Macinnes Award in recognition of her contributions to and impact on the nursing profession. In 2005, the Beta Kappa Chapter of Sigma ThetaTau International Honor Society of Nursing awarded her the Distinguished Nurse Award.

In addition to her extensive board and committee service with the AACN, Dr. Lancaster has held a number of offices in various professional organizations. She has served on the Board of Governors of the National League for Nursing, on the board of the National Council for Compensation Insurance and chaired the Committee on Graduate Nursing Education for the China Medical Board, to name a few.

In collaboration with various colleagues, she has published over 50 articles in a variety of professional journals and given more than 200 speeches and workshops throughout the United States and in several foreign countries. She edits the interdisciplinary journal Family and Community Health and has edited or co-edited eight textbooks.

Dr. Lancaster received her PhD in Public Health from the University of Oklahoma, her MS in Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing from Case Western Reserve University, and her BSN from the University of Tennessee, Memphis. She is a former dean and professor at Wright State University (Dayton, Ohio) and chaired master's programs in nursing at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

Her UVA tenure has been distinguished by her innovative efforts to improve gender imbalance at the University to give women a more equal role in decision-making, by new alliances forged within the UVA Health System, and by leading the School of Nursing to greater national prominence.

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