Celebrating extraordinary leadership and far-reaching impact on society
The M. Louise Fitzpatrick Award for Transformative Leadership is named in memory of M. Louise Fitzpatrick, EdD, RN, FAAN, Connelly Endowed Dean and Professor of Nursing, who led Villanova University’s College of Nursing from 1978 until her death in 2017. During those nearly 40 years, she developed the College into a premier nursing program, recognized repeatedly by the National League for Nursing as a Center of Excellence in Nursing Education. She is remembered as one of the most vibrant, transformative leaders in the history of Villanova University.
The M. Louise Fitzpatrick Award for Transformative Leadership should be conferred upon a person who demonstrates:
- Transformative leadership that has brought about change in nursing, health and/or health care
- A visionary perspective
- A commitment to excellence
- A concern for human dignity, ethics, service, diversity, underserved and vulnerable populations, and social justice, nationally and globally, that reflects the values and mission of Villanova University and the M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing.
2026 AWARD CEREMONY & LECTURE
Linda H. Aiken, PhD, RN, FAAN, FRCN
Professor of Nursing and Sociology
Founding Director, Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research
University of Pennsylvania
Thursday, October 22, 2026
5:30 p.m. ET
Driscoll Hall, Larson Kelly Auditorium
Fitzpatrick College of Nursing
Villanova University
Professor Linda Aiken is one of the most influential nurses in the world today. Her research has fundamentally reshaped global nursing and healthcare workforce standards. Her decades of empirical work demonstrated the critical link between nurse staffing levels, nurses’ educational preparation, and positive work environments with patient safety and patient outcomes, providing the scientific foundation for modern healthcare organization staffing policies worldwide.
Professor Aiken is a top, influential scientist in three academic disciplines: nursing, sociology, and health services and policy research. She has won the highest honors in all 3 disciplines including election to the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She is an elected fellow and past President of the American Academy of Nursing, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing, and Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. She was honored with Gustav O. Lienhard Award, the highest award of the National Academy of Medicine, for exceptional contributions to improving health care services in the U.S. and globally, and she received the highest award from the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Health Care Organizations for leadership utilizing performance measures to demonstrate relationships between nursing care and patient outcomes. She has received the highest awards in nursing including the Christiane Reimann Prize from the International Council of Nurses, the Inaugural International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame from Sigma Theta Tau International, celebrated as a Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing, and American Nurses Association President’s Award in 2026..
Professor Aiken has published more than 400 scientific papers in leading, high impact interdisciplinary journals including The Lancet, the BMJ (British Medical Journal), the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) and many others. She is on Clarivate’s List of Highly Cited Researchers in top 1% of citations in Web of Science in Social Sciences. As a testament to the impact of her research, Professor Aiken is featured on the major mural in Barcelona “Women Pioneers in Science” located at Barcelona’s most important hospital (Hospital Vall d’Hebron); the mural features 9 women in health sciences whose work throughout history has been exceptional, leading to progress in medicine.
Professor Aiken pioneered new methods for empirically measuring and studying the impact of the organizational context of health care delivery on patient outcomes. She developed a substantial body of evidence that modifiable features of clinicians’ work environments mediate the expected outcomes of evidence-based interventions in nursing and medicine resulting in, for example, continuing high incidence of healthcare acquired infections despite the availability of effective interventions to prevent infections. Before Dr. Aiken’s work, there was little attention to how modifiable features of work environments can enhance or detract from care effectiveness and from sustaining a qualified healthcare workforce. She applied her sociological findings from research on work environments in large hospitals to help design and disseminate an organizational intervention known as the Magnet Model that features creating structural empowerment of clinicians and transformational leadership in nursing and hospital management to fundamentally improve the context of healthcare delivery and its outcomes. The Magnet Model has been widely disseminated in the US resulting from Aiken’s numerous and compelling scientific publications showing the Magnet intervention produces better clinician retention, more favorable patient outcomes, and produces cost savings from shorter length of hospital stays and avoided readmissions. She currently directs the largest ever quasi-experimental trial scaling the Magnet model in European hospitals named Magnet4Europe. Professor Aiken was influential in obtaining more than $10 million from the European Commission and from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to support this work.
Another example of Professor Aiken’s pathbreaking and impactful research has resulted in baccalaureate education for professional nurses becoming the international standard across the world with documented positive impacts on health care outcomes. Before Aiken’s research, there was limited research on the value of baccalaureate education for nurses, partly because researchers had trouble figuring out how to study the impact of more education for nurses on patient outcomes. Education had historically been conceptualized as an individual characteristic of a nurse, but each patient was cared for by multiple nurses as compared, for example, to a single physician managing one patient’s care. Aiken, as a nurse sociologist, reconceptualized nursing education as a potentially modifiable property of an employing organization such as a hospital. She published pathbreaking papers in the Journal of the American Medical Association for U.S. hospitals and then in The Lancet for European hospitals showing each 10% increase the percent of hospital nurses with a baccalaureate degree was associated with a 7% decline in risk-adjusted mortality. The impact of her research was immediate and influential with the prestigious National Academy of Medicine in the U.S. recommending that the U.S. nurse workforce transition to at least 80% baccalaureate-qualified nurses by 2020 and the European Union and many other countries adopted similar policies.
Previous Award Recipients
Dr. Barbara Sattler is Professor Emeritus at the University of San Francisco and an international leader in environmental health and nursing. She has been an advisor to the US EPA’s Office of Child Health Protection and the National Library of Medicine for informational needs of health professionals on environmental health. She is a founding member of the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments.
Through her founding role with the California Nurses for Environmental Health and Justice she has been engaged in educating and involving nurses regarding climate-related extreme heat, storms, flooding, and fire-related human health risks. Sattler has been involved in disaster response in her local community, as well as national response, through the Medical Reserve Corps.
Previously, Dr. Sattler was at the University of Maryland School of Nursing for over 20 years where she directed the Environmental Health Education Center. As the Director, she was PI on NIEHS, EPA, HUD and USDA funded grants. The Center’s efforts included several programmatic themes, including Environmental Justice; Community-based action research; greening health care which included bringing healthy and sustainably grown foods to hospitals throughout the state; and working with communities that were challenged by lead based paint, hazardous waste sites, and air pollution.
Dr. Sattler is a Registered Nurse with an MPH and DrPH from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She is a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing.
Dr. Wallena Gould, EdD, CRNA, FADLN, FAANA, FAAN is the founder of the non-profit organization, Diversity in Nurse Anesthesia Mentorship Program and former Chief Nurse Anesthetist. For 18 years, this grassroots organization program has successfully mentored over 820 marginalized diverse critical care nurses into 92 out of 130 graduate nurse anesthesia programs.
In 2015, Dr. Gould was the lead consultant for a $1 million-dollar HRSA Workforce Diversity Grant for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Nurse Anesthesia Program. And, she served as AANA Chair of the Diversity Task Force from 2015 - 2016.
In 2015, Dr. Gould was inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.
Dr. Gould is the first Nurse Anesthetist of color inducted as a member into the Academy on contributory national work in diversifying the nurse anesthesia profession. In 2018, Dr. Gould was the recipient of the Trailblazer Award from the National Black Nurses Association.
Most notably, Dr. Gould was the recipient of the 2019 American Association of Nurse Anesthetists Agatha Hodgins Award for Outstanding Achievement. In August 2021, Dr. Gould was inducted in the inaugural cohort as a Fellow of the American Association of Nurse Anesthesiology.
In October 2022, Dr. Gould was selected as an American Academy of Nursing Edge Runner on an innovative evidenced-based nursing model, Immersion Model for Diversifying Nurse Anesthesia Programs. This is the first time a CRNA was recognized as a premier nursing model with the prestigious American Academy of Nursing.
Recently, served as the Chair of the Equity, Diversity, & Inclusivity Committee for the American Academy of Nursing and the Co-Chair, Education & Communication Innovation Committee, American Nurses Association
In March 2024, Dr. Gould was the team lead with 9 CRNA collaborators as the recipient of the American Nurses Association Innovation Team Award for the Immersion Model for Diversifying Nurse Anesthesia Programs.
Lastly, Dr. Gould is a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated since 1988.
Dr. Loretta Sweet Jemmott, an expert in health promotion research, is one of the nation's foremost investigators in the field of HIV/AIDS prevention, with perhaps the most consistent track record of evidence-based, HIV risk-reduction interventions. She and her husband, John B. Jemmott, III, PhD, have attracted more than $150 million in NIH funding over the past two decades to design and test interventions to reduce the risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among diverse populations in the U.S., Botswana, South Africa, Jamaica, Mexico and Puerto Rico. Publishing over 100 peer-reviewed articles, books and chapters, her studies not only reported reducing risk-associated sexual behaviors, but also the incidence of STIs.
Dr. Jemmott is an outstanding translational and community-engagement researcher. She partnered with community-based organizations, from churches and clinics to barbershops, housing developments and schools, transforming her research outcomes for use in real-world settings. To date, eight of her evidence-based interventions have been designated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Adolescent Health for national and international dissemination used in 48 states across the nation.
After retiring from a successful 20-year tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Jemmott joined Drexel in 2015 as vice president for Health and Health Equity and professor in the College of Nursing and Health Professions. Here she led the We’re Here Because We Care: Building Healthy Communities Together, using a qualitative, community-engaged approach to determine their health concerns and partnered with them to create health promotion initiatives. This led to the creation Drexel’s Community Wellness HUB. Dr. Jemmott also works with faculty to build their program of research, co-leads the Implementation Science Research Working Group, the Fall Institute on Implementation Science Research and teaches community engagement, intervention development and implementation science courses.
Dr. Jemmott earned her BSN from Hampton Institute of Nursing, and her MSN in Child, Adolescent and Family Mental Health Nursing as well as her PhD in Human Sexuality Education from the University of Pennsylvania.
Under Dr. Beverly Malone’s leadership, the National League for Nursing has advanced the science of nursing education by promoting greater collaboration among stakeholders, increasing diversity in nursing and nursing education, and advancing excellence in care for patients. Her distinguished career has mixed policy, education, administration and clinical practice, including as federal deputy assistant secretary for health under President Bill Clinton.
As a reviewer, Dr. Malone contributed to the groundbreaking IOM report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health. She served on the Minority Health Federal Advisory Committee, a federal panel established to advise the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, and is currently a member of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Board of Directors where she is vice chair. She has received more than 20 honorary degrees.
Elected two terms as president of the American Nurses Association representing 180,000 nurses, Dr. Malone also served as the first US and African American general secretary of the United Kingdom (UK) Royal College of Nursing representing 400,000 nurses. A member of the UK as well as US delegation to the World Health Assembly, she was also vice chair of the Brussels-based European Federation of Nurses Association.
Dr. Malone’s awards and honors are numerous, including the American Nurses Association President's Award and the American Academy of Nursing “Living Legend” status. She received a citation from the American Psychological Association for her outstanding leadership in advancing excellence in healthcare for the nation and global community and, in 2021, Modern Healthcare honored her with a Top 25 Women Leaders' Luminary Award and named her to the inaugural list of five Minority Healthcare Luminaries.
Dr. Mason is Senior Policy Service Professor at the Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement, George Washington University School of Nursing; and Professor Emerita at Hunter College, where she held the Rudin Endowed Chair and founded the Center for Health, Media & Policy. She is the Programme Director for the International Council of Nurses’ Global Nursing Leadership Institute, a past President of the American Academy of Nursing, and former editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Nursing.
She has produced and hosted radio programs on health and health policy since 1985, and currently hosts HealthCetera in the Catskills on WIOX Radio. She has served as the only health professional on the National Advisory Committee for Kaiser Health News since its inception in 2009. Dr. Mason is the lead editor of the book, Policy and Politics in Nursing and Health Care, now in its 8th edition, and blogs on policy for JAMA Health Forum. She is the principal investigator on a 2017 replication of the 1997 Woodhull Study on Nurses and the Media published in 2018 in the Journal of Nursing Scholarship and an additional analysis of journalists’ experiences with using nurses as sources in health news stories, published in the American Journal of Nursing. She is Chair of the National Advisory Board for the Rush Center Health and Social Care Integration and of the Steering Committee for the Catskills Addiction Coalition. She serves on the boards of directors for the Primary Care Development Corporation, Public Health Solutions, and Margaretville Hospital (part of the Westchester Medical Health Network).
She was the only nurse serving on the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s committee and report on Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care. She is the recipient of numerous awards for policy, leadership, dissemination of science, writing, education, public health, media and advocacy; most recently the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Health Policy by the New York Academy of Medicine in 2019 and the Archon Award for Leadership from Sigma Theta Tau International Nursing Honorary Society.
Dr. Mason received a BSN from West Virginia University, MSN from St. Louis University, and PhD from New York University; and holds an honorary doctorate of science from West Virginia University and an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Long Island University.
Dr. Patricia A. Grady was appointed Director of the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) on April 3, 1995. She earned her undergraduate degree in nursing from Georgetown University, and pursued her graduate education at the University of Maryland, receiving a master’s degree from the School of Nursing and a doctorate in physiology from the School of Medicine.
Marian S. Ware Professor in Gerontology, Director of the NewCourtland Center for Transitions and Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing; Trustee, Villanova University
Dr. Naylor is the architect of the Transitional Care Model (TCM), an advanced practice nurse-coordinated, team-based innovation targeting high risk older adults that is recognized as a top evidence-based approach with a positive impact on the health and well-being of chronically ill older adults across the U.S., while assuring wiser use of societal resources. It is also being leveraged globally.
2020 postponed due to COVID-19.
Accreditation
Villanova University M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing is accredited as a provider of nursing continuing professional development by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation.