Research Profiles: Moving toward the light: Lynn Lotas The healing power of sleep: Kathy Parker Unconcealed strength: Peggy Moloney The once and future King: Joyce King The union of hands and hearts: Christi Deaton

onths of careful strategizing by Health Sciences Center leaders culminated this past spring in a few quick strokes of the pen that will permanently alter the landscape of nursing at Emory. In the following pages, we look at these milestone decisions - to establish a new doctoral program and build a new nursing school - and examine the work of five faculty researchers whose scholarship helped shape the blueprint that will guide the school into the new environment and into the next century. The central mission of the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing - as with the schools of medicine and public health - is to produce health care leaders through the integration of patient care, teaching, and research. The nursing school has long excelled in the first two arms of this triangle, and since 1996 - with the arrival of Dr. Michael Johns as executive vice president for health affairs - it has been actively engaged in bringing its research achievements to an equal level. Dr. Johns' explicitly stated goal is to see each of the schools in the health sciences move into the top ranks nationally of research institutions. In the School of Nursing, Drs. Sandra Dunbar and Lynn Lotas led a faculty team charged with writing the research strategic plan for accomplishing this goal. For the next five to seven years, their plan will guide the school along the path to preeminence. Writing this plan meant taking a hard look at the school's strengths and weaknesses, benchmarking it against other nursing research institutions, and looking at significant trends in health care and research funding. The end result was that the group recommended ways to retain and enhance the school's strengths while, importantly, identifying and remedying its deficiencies. The two areas of greatest concern were the lack of a doctoral program (which hinders the ability to recruit senior research faculty and to support faculty development into independent researchers) and inadequate research work space. These concerns were addressed in a pair of landmark decisions.

e had to have a doctoral program," says Lotas, "for us to continue to recruit the best and brightest research faculty and to build our research program." Efforts to launch a nursing doctoral program at Emory actually began in the early 1980s and intensified during the deanship of Dr. Dyanne Affonso and with the addition to the faculty of a number of nationally recognized scholars. In fall 1997, an external review committee comprised of three respected nursing scholars provided critique and consultation as the faculty steered through the various levels of approval required by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The doctoral curriculum was subsequently refined and approved unanimously by the Graduate School and the Board of Trustees. With the admission of its first nursing PhD candidates in the fall of 1999, Emory will join 64 other nursing doctoral programs across the nation, including two in Georgia. Along with the approval of the doctoral program, the research strategic plan also indicated that the school - to handle the requirements of educating PhD students and to achieve our research mission - needs to increase its percentage of doctorally prepared faculty. Compared with peer nursing institutions, Emory's nursing school has been slow in adding a PhD program to its curriculum, says Lotas. Adding one at this date, however, offers some advantages. For one, curriculum designers have been able to build a program that addresses front-burner issues in today's health care environment. Specific themes of the curriculum are ethics, health services delivery, and health care policy. "We have been able to create a strong interdisciplinary program that addresses the underlying issues of health care," says Lotas, "while focusing on our existing areas of strength - research into adult cardiovascular disease and cancer and in women's health across the lifespan. This, I believe, will stand us in good stead in the years to come."

n order to accommodate additional students, faculty, and research, the university agreed with the dean and faculty that a larger building was needed for the School of Nursing. In the spring of 1998, the green light was given to erect a 100,000-square-foot, five-story structure that will house the nursing school, as well as some other health sciences programs. The new Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing building will stand along Clifton Road, near the research nerve center occupied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Cancer Society, the Rollins Research Building, and the Grace Crum Rollins School of Public Health. With such neighbors, the new nursing school will be ideally positioned to foster an academic environment that nurtures interdisciplinary, collaborative scholarship while embracing the school's vision to produce nurse leaders in the science of caring and health care delivery. For people driving down Clifton Road, this building will be their first impression of the Emory campus. Atlanta architects Stang & Newdow have been picked to design the $20-million structure, which is expected to be open in the year 2001. Even without the benefit of such a space, key senior-level faculty - like cancer researcher Deborah McGuire and premenstrual syndrome research leader Ora Strickland - have brought national recognition and national research grant funding to the school and have served ably as mentors to other faculty. Their efforts have created strong core programs that can be expanded into the fertile environment of the new building and new curriculum. With more physical space, other faculty can be brought in to complement their work - as well as doctoral students, who will bring additional energy and new ideas. In this scenario - with an infusion of energy and intellect coming from established researchers on the one side and PhD candidates on the other - it is the mid-career researcher who stands to gain the most. Emory is particularly gifted with promising nursing researchers, and in the following pages, we look at a quintet of these bedrock scholars. In discussing their various projects, each researcher cites her clinical experience as the wellspring of her investigation and as the chief informant of her teaching. Although exploring very different worlds, each has her feet firmly planted in the realm of patient outcomes - of improved patient health - a shared outlook that encapsulates and defines nursing research at Emory.   The research profiles were written by Emory Nursing Editor Darryl Gossett and Mary Mallison, RN, an Atlanta freelancer and former editor of the American Journal of Nursing. Illustrations by Louise Britton.