Jennifer Burgher Seaman | School of Nursing

PhD, RN, CHPN

Assistant Professor

Acute & Tertiary Care

Profile

Dr. Seaman’s research centers on advancing primary palliative care, the integration of palliative care principles and practices into the routine care of patients and families. Dr. Seaman’s training and research have been funded through the National Institute of Nursing Research, the John A. Hartford Foundation, the Mayday Fund, the National Heart Lung Blood Institute, the Cambia Health Foundation, the American Thoracic Society (ATS) and intramural awards from the University of Pittsburgh. She has received further training through the Hospice and Palliative Care Nurses Association (HPNA) Scholars Program, Johns Hopkins Summer Research Institute, and the National Institutes of Health/Veterans Administration Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health (TIDIRH) In addition to her training and research funding, Dr. Seaman has received funding from the McElhattan Foundation to develop and implement primary palliative care education for clinician-leaders and direct care providers.

Dr. Seaman is core faculty in Pitt’s Center for Bioethics and Health Law and its Palliative Research Center (PaRC). She is affiliated faculty in the Program on Ethics and Decision Making in Critical Illness in the Center for Research, Investigating, and Systems Modeling of Acute Illness (CRISMA) within the Department of Critical Care Medicine, and she holds a secondary appointment in the Section of Palliative Care and Medical Ethics in the Department of General Internal Medicine in the School of Medicine. Dr. Seaman is also a co-investigator in the Outreach, Recruitment and Engagement Core of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

Scholarly Emphasis

Within the ICU setting, Dr. Seaman’s work is focused on improving clinician-family communication through the implementation of proactive interprofessional family meetings. With the support of her Cambia Health Foundation Sojourns Scholar Leadership and ATS Nursing Research awards, she developed SET-to-Meet, a nurse-led, team-based primary palliative care intervention to ensure timely family meetings are held for incapacitated ICU patients. Within the ambulatory care setting, Dr. Seaman studies the delivery of palliative-oriented care for persons with dementia and their caregivers. Dr. Seaman has expertise is qualitative methods, implementation science, and intervention fidelity monitoring.

Teaching

Dr. Seaman’s McElhattan Foundation-funded project includes the development of a graduate certificate in Palliative and End-of-Life Care and Communication. She has developed and will focus on teaching three of the four constituent courses: Principles and Practices of Palliative and End-of-Life Care; Promoting Comfort through Pain and Symptom Management; and Conversation & Collaboration: Communication with Patients, Families, and Colleagues. Dr. Seaman guest lectures annually on palliative and end-of-life care for undergraduate courses in healthcare ethics and gerontological nursing. In addition, she has been invited to speak about primary palliative care to academic and professional audiences.

Service

Locally, Dr. Seaman is a member of the Eta Chapter of Sigma and served on the Eta Chapter board from 2010 to 2021. Nationally, Dr. Seaman is a member of HPNA and the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN). Internationally, Dr. Seaman has been a member of the ATS since 2015. Within the ATS she has served in multiple leadership roles. She serves on the ATS workgroup to promote Primary Palliative Care Education and Practice, and most recently she was elected to the ATS Board as chair-elect of the Nursing Assembly.