Announcement Regarding Dean Mundinger of the School of Nursing
Dear fellow
member of the Columbia community:
Mary O'Neil Mundinger,
RN, DrPH, dean of our School
of Nursing since 1988, has
advised us of her wish to step down as dean. We have accepted her decision with
great appreciation for her distinguished service and asked her to remain as
dean until June 2010, or until a successor is in place. A member of our faculty
since 1982, Dr. Mundinger has created a lasting legacy not only at Columbia but
also nationally by championing advanced practice nursing, pioneering an
expanded role for nurses that emphasizes their professional autonomy and
critical importance in providing comprehensive care, and creating a new
clinical doctoral degree, which has been widely emulated at universities around
the country.
Just two
decades ago, Columbia's School of Nursing
was struggling to define its future. Dr. Mundinger, appointed acting dean in
1986 and then dean in 1988, righted the School. Her requirement that all
nursing faculty establish either a faculty practice or a research program
attracted skilled clinicians and researchers, whose experiences informed their
teaching. Under her extraordinary leadership, the School began accumulating an
impressive list of accomplishments, including creating the School's first
research program, which now has a total of 36 projects with cumulative funding
of more than $30 million; this represents the highest per capita NIH faculty
research funding of any nursing school in the nation. She established 10
endowed chairs, created two doctoral programs - a PhD and DNP - and increased
the School's endowment from less than $3 million in 1986 to over $100 million
in 2008.
Most
notably, Dr. Mundinger led the School
of Nursing to the
forefront of education advances in nursing with the development of a Doctor of
Nursing Practice (DNP) degree. Helping to fill the nationwide shortage of
primary care clinicians, the program educates nurses in sophisticated
diagnostic and treatment competencies needed to care for patients in a variety
of settings, from hospital to ambulatory care. Established in 2004, the DNP
program was the first of its kind in the world. Since then, more than 200
schools have established similar clinical doctorate programs or have plans to
institute such a program.
Dr.
Mundinger is founder of Columbia Advanced Practice Nurse Associates (CAPNA),
the first independent primary care faculty practice in which nurse
practitioners hold commercial managed care contracts and are compensated at the
same rate as primary care physicians. The School was also the first in which
faculty gained admitting privileges at an academic health center hospital. Dr. Mundinger was named the Centennial
Professor in Health Policy at the School
of Nursing in 1995, the
first chair of health policy in a nursing school nationwide. Her contributions
to the advancement of nursing have been acknowledged with elected membership to
the Institute of Medicine
of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy
of Nursing, and the New York Academy of Medicine. She holds a BS degree cum laude from the University
of Michigan and a doctorate in public
health from Columbia's
Mailman School of Public Health.
We want to
extend our gratitude to Dr. Mundinger for her singular service to Columbia as a devoted
member of our community for 27 years. Her exceptional contributions will
resonate for generations of nurses to come - both at Columbia and beyond. Andrew Davidson, PhD,
MBA, executive vice dean and professor in the Mailman School of Public Health,
has agreed to chair the search committee that will begin an international
search for her successor shortly.
Lee C. Bollinger
President
Lee Goldman, MD
Executive Vice President for Health and
Biomedical Sciences and Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine
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