Rutgers School of Nursing alumna Cheryl Krause-Parello will be the keynote speaker for the school’s 2025 Convocation. The founder of Canines Providing Assistance to Wounded Warriors (CPAWW), a program supporting coping therapies for veterans and public policy on their behalf, is pictured in 2020 with her dachshunds Daisy, left, and Heidi. Daisy since has “crossed the rainbow bridge.” Photo by Alex Dolce.

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In the months following 9/11, Cheryl Krause-Parello (PhD, RN, FAAN) watched her husband David, a first responder and Marine veteran, come home at night, mentally and physically exhausted from his recovery efforts after the World Trade Center towers collapsed. To decompress, he would always sit next to their dachshund, Samantha.

“I would watch him quietly from a distance, and I felt like every time he petted her, he was petting away the stress and trauma he experienced each day,” says Krause-Parello, who will be the convocation speaker for her alma mater the Rutgers University School of Nursing, Rutgers Health, in Newark on May 21. “He bonded with her like nobody’s business. He saw horrific things. She saved him every night.”

Their relationship was a familiar subject to her. After completing her bachelor’s degree at Seton Hall University and her master’s at St. Peter’s University, Krause-Parello would go on to Rutgers–Newark to earn her doctor of philosophy in nursing research in 2007 studying human-animal interaction—how pets can help people with everything from loneliness to living longer—long before the concept was mainstream.

Inspired by her husband, she continued researching this connection through the lens of veterans, and in 2013 she created Canines Providing Assistance to Wounded Warriors, more commonly known as CPAWW, at Florida Atlantic University where she is now associate vice president for research.

The Vocation of Nursing Research

A self-proclaimed lifelong “helper,” Krause-Parello had pharmacists and a nurse in her immediate family. And a dachshund owner from the age of four, she cared for these dogs and grew up having a lot of empathy, she says.

“It was a natural progression for me to enter nursing as a caring profession and wanting to help others, whether it’s humans or animals,” she says.