The College of Nursing’s Executive Associate Dean J. Dwayne Hooks Jr., PhD, has been inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.

Hooks is among 231 distinguished nurses who were inducted during the academy’s annual health policy conference Oct. 29. Fellows are chosen based on their significant contributions to health and health care. This year’s class represents 35 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and 17 countries. The academy is comprised of nursing leaders who are experts in policy, research, administration, practice and academia and who champion health and wellness locally and globally.

Career accomplishments that led to Hooks’s selection include leading one of the CON’s Health Resources and Services Administration grants. He is the primary investigator for a five-year $2.3 million grant, which was awarded in 2018, titled “Rebalancing the RN Curricula to Advance Primary Care (ReCAP),” that provides funding for exploring nursing care models in primary and ambulatory care settings with pre-licensure Bachelor of Nursing students, including the Nurse-Managed Health Center.

To date, the ReCAP program has introduced 116 nursing students to more than 12,000 clinical hours with 12 partners at 57 clinical sites across the state, with CON’s Nurse-Managed Health Center being one of them. The ReCAP program informs ambulatory care competency-based education for nursing programs, and the goal is for other schools and colleges of nursing to incorporate these competencies into their curriculums.

Hooks is also the co-principal investigator and clinical director of another $1.5 million HRSA grant, awarded in 2020, aimed at integrating behavioral and physical health services in nurse-led practices. The Complete Care Program team has deployed nine telehealth workstations in three counties within five schools and one community service board. This project team is building resources that other nurse-led programs can utilize to provide integrated mental and physical health services.

Hooks joins Dean Tanya Sudia and Hope Bussenius, DNP, Cynthia Chernecky, PhD, and Terri Marin, PhD, as faculty previously inducted as American Academy of Nursing fellows.