Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth Houston Dean Diane Santa Maria, DrPH, MSN, RN, has been selected by the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society as a 2022 inductee into the International Nurse Research Hall of Fame.
Santa Maria and 31 other world-renowned nurse researchers will be honored during an induction ceremony July 25, 2022, during the 33rd International Nursing Research Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland.
“I am greatly honored and humbled to be counted among this group of scholars who have contributed so much to advancing scientific knowledge of nursing best practices,” said Santa Maria, the Jane and Robert Cizik Distinguished Chair and Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair in Nursing Education Leadership.
Rooted in public health and community health nursing, much of Santa Maria’s research portfolio focuses on youth experiencing homelessness and HIV prevention. She is currently a principal or co-investigator on grants totaling more than $5.4 million. These include her “Come As You Are” R01 grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research, which funds an efficacy trial of a nurse case management intervention for HIV prevention and care among youth experiencing homelessness. She has also been awarded two supplements – one to explore COVID-19 impacts on the study group, and the other to focus on sexual- and gender-minority subpopulations.
Santa Maria joined Cizik School of Nursing in 2009 and became an Assistant Professor in 2013 after working next door as a teaching assistant at the UTHealth School of Public Health while earning her Doctor of Public Health. She served as a visiting professor at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine’s Center for AIDS Prevention Studies from 2016-2018. Santa Maria was granted tenure and appointed dean ad interim of Cizik School of Nursing in 2018 before being named dean effective September 1, 2020. She is a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine.
The July event will bring the total number of inductees to the International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame to 250 since its inception in 2010. Among the first group of honorees was retired Cizik School of Nursing Professor Nancy Bergstrom, PhD, RN, FAAN, the former Trumble Professor of Aging Research, who was instrumental in developing the Braden Scale for Predicting Pressure Sore Risk. In 2020, she established a permanent endowment for the Nancy Bergstrom Gerontological Nursing Scholarship at Cizik School of Nursing, which provides an annual award to a doctoral student with a study concentration in gerontology.
(Banner image) Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth Houston Dean Diane Santa Maria, DrPH, MSN, RN