
The University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing presents:
Frontiers of Discovery: Pitt Advancing Nursing Science Through Research
a Florence Erickson and Reva Rubin Endowed Lecture event
Friday, November 21, 2025
8am to 3:30pm
University of Pittsburgh | Alan Magee Scaife Hall
Auditorium, Room 3785, 3rd Floor
2550 Terrace St.
Pittsburgh, PA 15261
Keynote Speaker:
Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk, PhD, APRN-CNP, EBP-C, FAANP, FNAP, FAAN

Register for the Event: RSVP Form
About the Keynote Address
The Department of Professional Development and Continuing Education presents a Florence Erickson and Reva Rubin Endowed Lectureship event, which showcases a nurse researcher. The keynote speaker, Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk, PhD, is an inspirational speaker, author, leader, innovator, entrepreneur and recognized expert in evidence-based practice, mental health, population health and well-being, intervention research and organizational culture change.
She will discuss how to build an impactful program of research or evidence-based quality-improvement project, and address clinician well-being and burnout.
About Pitt Nursing Research Day
In addition to the endowed visiting lectureship event, the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing Office of Research and Scholarship will showcase the impactful research conducted by faculty, students and postdoctoral scholars at Pitt Nursing. This will be accomplished during two sessions divided into oral presentations and digital poster presentations. Each session will highlight the Nursing Research and Scholarship HUBS, which include digital health research, genomics of patient outcomes, sleep and circadian science, nursing health services and policy, maternal/perinatal and reproductive health, aging and gerontology, nursing education and clinical research for evidence-based practice and cancer survivorship.
Agenda
8am to 8:45am • Sign-in and Opening Remarks
9am to 10:30am • Keynote speaker with Q&A
10:30am to 10:45am • Break
10:45am to 12:30pm • Oral Presentations
12:30pm to 1:30pm • Lunch and Networking
1:30pm to 3:15pm • Digital Poster Presentations
3:15pm to 3:30pm • Closing Remarks
Learning Outcomes and Contact Hours
Upon completion of this activity, participants should be able to:
- Identify three types of climate-associated disasters
- Discuss the use of GIS as an essential tool for disaster research
- Recognize nursing research’s impact on nursing science and practice
Nurses participating in the educational activity and submitting an evaluation may be awarded a maximum of 1.0 nursing continuing professional development (NCPD) contact hour.
The University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing is accredited as a provider of nursing continuing professional development by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation.
For more information, contact Paulina Gatarz (412-624-3323 or pag17@pitt.edu) or Yvette Conley (yconley@pitt.edu or 412-383-7641).
Register: RSVP Form
About the Keynote Speaker
Dr. Bernadette Melnyk is an inspirational speaker, author, leader, innovator, entrepreneur and recognized expert in evidence-based practice, mental health, population health and well-being, intervention research and organizational culture change. She also is CEO and founder of COPE2Thrive, LLC. and president and co-founder of EBPSolutions, LLC. For 13 years, she served as Vice President for Health Promotion and Chief Wellness Officer at The Ohio State University, the first at an institution of higher learning in the nation in which she conceptualized, where she also was the Helene Fuld Health Trust Professor of Evidence-based Practice (EBP) in the College of Nursing and Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry in the College of Medicine. In addition, she founded the Helene Fuld Health Trust National Institute for Evidence-based Practice in Nursing and Healthcare.
Bern is a frequent keynote speaker at national and international conferences, and has presented hundreds of motivational workshops on EBP, mental health, organizational culture change, intervention research, leadership, and health and wellness throughout the nation and globe. She is editor of 11 books focused on EBP, child and adolescent mental health, intervention research, evidence-based health assessment, leadership, innovation and entrepreneurship, and wellness.
Dr. Melnyk has more than 600 publications and over $36 million dollars of sponsored funding from NIH, AHRQ and foundations as a principal investigator. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Nursing that has recognized her three times as an Edge Runner, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academies of Practice, and the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Dr. Melnyk served a four-year term on the United States Preventive Services Task Force, the National Advisory Council for the National Institute for Nursing Research, and the Behavioral Health Standing Committee of the National Quality Forum. In addition, she served as dean of The Ohio State University College of Nursing and Arizona State University’s College of Nursing and Health Innovation where she led the colleges to top U.S. News & World Report and NIH research funding rankings.
Dr. Melnyk currently serves as an elected board member and chair of the National Forum for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention and received honorary doctoral degrees from the State University of New York and Frontier Nursing University. Her evidence-based COPE cognitive-behavioral skills building programs for depression and anxiety are being used in primary care practices in all 50 states with reimbursement, K-12 schools, and universities across the country as well as five other countries. Dr. Melnyk is editor-in-chief of Sigma’s top ranked journal Worldviews on Evidence-based Nursing.
She was appointed to the National Academy of Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-being and Resilience in 2017 on which she still continues to serve, on the advisory board for the ANA’s Healthy Nurse Healthy Nation initiative and is the founder and immediate past president of the National Consortium for Building Healthy Academic Communities. She received her Bachelor of Science in nursing from West Virginia University, her Master of Science in nursing degree and pediatric nurse practitioner education from the University of Pittsburgh, and her PhD in clinical research and psychiatric nurse practitioner education from the University of Rochester.