Three Rutgers School of Nursing faculty members and three New Jersey-based alumni have been selected to be inducted into the American Academy of Nursing’s 2021 Class of Fellows. The inductees will be recognized for their significant contributions to health and health care at the Academy’s annual Health Policy Conference, taking place on October 7-9, 2021.

School of Nursing faculty Caroline Dorsen (PhD, FNP-BC), Carolyn Hayes (PhD, RN, NEA-BC), and Olga F. Jarrín Montaner (PhD, RN) are among the 225 distinguished nurse leaders to be inducted. Alumni Amanda Hessels (PhD, MPH, RN, CIC, CPHQ, FAPIC), Maureen A. Madden (DNP, RN, CPNP-AC, CCRN, FCCM), and Larider Ruffin (DNP, APN, RN, ANP-BC, AGNP-C, CRNP, CTTS), will also be inducted this year.

“I’m so pleased that so many Rutgers Nurses were selected this year to join the Academy,” said Linda Flynn (PhD, RN, FAAN), professor and dean of the nursing school. “In fact,” she said, “of the seven New Jersey-based incoming fellows, six of them are Rutgers Nurses. This truly demonstrates our school’s motto–Excellence in Action. Congratulations to our Rutgers Nurses and the entire Academy Class of 2021”

Through a competitive, rigorous application process, fellows are selected based on their contributions to advance the public’s health. Induction into the Academy is a significant milestone in a nurse leader’s career. With the new fellows, the Academy will comprise more than 2,900 nursing leaders who are experts in policy, research, administration, practice, and academia.

Caroline Dorsen

Dorsen is a clinical associate professor and the associate dean of advanced practice and clinical partnerships. She oversees the school’s Division of Advanced Practice, which includes one of the largest, most comprehensive, and highest ranked DNP programs in the nation. She is a pioneering nurse practitioner, educator, and researcher. For 20 years, she has been a national leader in raising awareness about LGBTQ+ health disparities, bringing this issue to the forefront on national agendas for nursing education, practice, policy and research. Her expertise has informed and influenced curriculum, standards of care, and health policy. She has held progressively more prominent leadership positions in national organizations working to reduce health disparities, promote health justice, and amplify the nursing voice.

Carolyn Hayes

Hayes, an adjunct associate professor at the School of Nursing, is the chief nursing officer for RWJBarnabas Oncology Services and for Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, responsible for ensuring nursing excellence throughout an integrated cancer care model. Prior to joining Rutgers in 2019, her leadership roles included president and executive director of the Greater Boston Nursing Collective and associate chief nurse for Oncology, Medical and Integrative Nursing at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Her clinical and leadership practice, teaching, research, and publications have been focused on integrative nursing, clinical ethics, leadership, and end-of-life nursing care.

Olga F. Jarrín Montaner

An assistant professor at Rutgers School of Nursing, Jarrín directs the Community Health and Aging Outcomes Laboratory at Rutgers’ Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. A nurse scientist dedicated to reducing health disparities, she is leading two large National Institutes of Health-funded team science research projects focused on improving late-life care quality and outcomes for people living with advanced illness including Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. These projects build on her ongoing work examining home health care outcomes among racial/ethnic minority older adults living with chronic and advanced illness, originally started with a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Jarrín is also working to advance the nursing profession as director of the Minority Nurse Leader Institute at the School of Nursing.

Amanda Hessels

An assistant professor of nursing at Columbia University and nurse scientist at Hackensack Meridian Health, Hessels is a 2014 graduate of the PhD in Nursing program at Rutgers School of Nursing. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2014 Stanley S. Bergen, Jr., MD Medal of Excellence and the 2012 Dr. Dorothy J. DeMaio Research Fellowship Award, both from Rutgers. As a doctoral student, she received a prestigious grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to support her dissertation research on health information technology and its impact on patient care quality. Her research interests include healthcare quality and patient safety, infection prevention and control, missed nursing care, occupational health and safety, organizational culture and climate, and simulation.

Maureen A. Madden

Madden, who received her DNP from Rutgers School of Nursing in 2021, is a professor of pediatrics at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a nurse practitioner in pediatric critical care at the Bristol Myers Squibb Children’s Hospital. Her leadership pioneered the first multimodal international training program of its kind, known as the Pediatric Fundamentals of Critical Care Support (PFCCS) course. The global reach of this educational program demonstrated sustainability and replicability over the past 10 years, evidenced by more than 1,200 courses conducted in 32 countries, which educated over 22,000 health care providers. By providing health care providers with access to the latest evidence-based training, her work is helping to reduce disparities in care in underserved and less-resourced environments.

Larider Ruffin

Ruffin holds a BS in Nursing (’07) and an MSN (’10) from Rutgers School of Nursing, where he received the 2017 Rising Star Alumnus Award from the school’s alumni association. He is an assistant professor and coordinator of the MSN program at Stockton University and the founding chair of Ruffin Associates Healthy Housecalls LLC. His clinical practice includes primary care, family medicine, chronic disease management, hospital readmission reduction, and smoking cessation. A past president of the Northern New Jersey Black Nurses Association, he has chaired the National Black Nurses Association’s committee on substance use disorders. Determined to eradicate smoking—especially among communities of color, he developed a smoking cessation program and smoking and vaping education toolkit being used by nurses in more than 35 states.

Including Dorsen and Jarrín, the total number of AAN fellows on faculty at Rutgers School of Nursing comes to 17, or approximately 15 percent of full-time faculty. “I’m sure that we could count many AAN fellows when we consider our adjunct faculty and more than 12,000 alumni,” said Dean Flynn.