Newark, New Brunswick, & Blackwood, NJ
Blackwood Campus Program Co-director and Clinical Associate Professor
Division of Entry to Baccalaureate Nursing
Blackwood
Jefferson Hall 115
(856) 566-6770
Specialty: Overcoming transitional challenges for new students
Catherine Morse serves as program director of the 2 + 2 baccalaureate nursing program’s entry to practice division at Rutgers School of Nursing’s Blackwood Campus in southern New Jersey, where she also is a clinical assistant professor.
In her work, Dr. Morse stresses empowerment of her peers and subordinates to think both critically and creatively to develop a love for life-long learning. She believes that strong organizations must encourage diversity and respect for translational evidence to improve patient care. She strives to prepare nursing school graduates for an uncertain and rapidly changing healthcare environment.
Her teaching duties span pathophysiology, pharmacotherapeutics, and leadership courses. In 2017, she implemented Shared Learner Content (SLC) as an instructional strategy to help students integrate knowledge from all nursing courses to form critical thinking pathways. The SLC format provides contextual meaning and reduces content isolation (e.g. the silo effect) during active learning. It also helps students, even via an “on paper” exercise, to foster the elements of caring and empathy, and to develop an understanding of sociocultural differences that nurses encounter in their everyday work.
Dr. Morse’s clinical research interests include patient safety initiatives, along with advancing clinical knowledge, transitional leadership roles and strategies to promote critical thinking, self-efficacy and competencies in nursing students. In 2018, a grant to establish the Nursing Center of Excellence for Adolescents at Rutgers’ Blackwood Campus. The center’s primary research objective is development of a self-care model to help southern New Jersey adolescents’ access accurate health information, and to find community resources to address specific health issues. The research will focus on integrating the self-care model with electronic device-friendly software applications.
Dr. Morse serves as chair of the New Jersey Association of Nurse Anesthetists [NJANA] Education Program Committee.
Her career includes two decades of service in the U.S. Army Reserves as a clinical nurse, anesthesia. During four separate periods between 2003 and 2014, she completed active duty tours both within the U.S. and in Afghanistan and Iraq. She currently holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
Dr. Morse earned her doctoral degree in education from the University of Phoenix. She also holds a master’s degree in nursing from University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey and a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of the State of New York at Albany.