School of Nursing | GW Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service

Joyce Pulcini

Director of Community and Global Initiatives Chair of the Acute & Chronic Care Faculty Community

Joyce Pulcini has led or overseen service learning trips for students to Haiti, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Uganda and has developed Global Health Courses for graduate and undergraduate students. As Director of Community and Global Initiatives, the school has greatly increased its international reach in service learning trips which now have increased to about eight trips per year which provide nursing students with rich international community health experiences. Her other area of research is in school health for children with asthma and school nursing. She was a founding member of the Massachusetts School Nurse Research Network in 2004, an organization which is still in operation and fosters research productivity with practicing school nurses. She is currently involved with two community grants around coordination of care for children with asthma and their families. Her second grant was the Rodham Institute Academic Community Development Award for 2016, entitled, Engaging communities to enhance coordinated asthma care.

Sydnae Law headshot

Director of Community Engagement & Partnership Operations

Sydnae Law, an innovative executive in academic medicine, with a demonstrated ability to optimize interdisciplinary resources, provides leadership, strategic and operational oversight to sustain civic engagement and collaborative partnerships across the local, national and global communities that are served by the GW School of Nursing. She is a key leader for all administrative activities for the GW Nursing Office of Clinical Practice and Community Engagement including the Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement, the Center for Aging, Health and Humanities and GW Nursing’s Global Initiatives.

karen

Assistant Professor

Dr. Karen Dawn is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at George Washington University, teaching in the Accelerated Bachelor of Science program. She has over 30 years’ experience in community health nursing, including diabetes management, chronic disease prevention, health promotion and developer of hundreds of creative health education tools to assist people manage chronic disease. Her specialties include diabetes education and research, health promotion, disease prevention, primary care and public health. She is a Certified Diabetes Educator and Public Health Clinical Nurse Specialist and has extensive experience working with undergraduate nursing students in community settings, including international trips to Uganda and Haiti, public health departments, senior centers, community service boards, free clinics, homeless shelters, summer camps with vulnerable populations, and environment protection. She is actively involved with several community partnerships, particularly Onmi-med in Uganda, the AnBryce Foundation, and the Loudoun County Department of Aging

Athey

Dr. Athey is on the local and national board of directors for the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care and specializes in HIV/AIDS in D.C. For almost a decade, she has worked in Ward 8 as a community engaged scholar in an effort to bring innovation to a population most in need of health care.

She was selected as a fellow into the inaugural Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Change Leadership program in 2016. She and her colleague developed the program Mental Health Improvement through Studying, Teaching, Rebranding, Embedded Education and Technology initiative, using barbershops in Southeast, D.C. to promote mental health literacy to African American men. Athey has been awarded the Hillman Emergent Innovation Award to expand the reach of the program by training District youth to use storytelling to improve health literacy in non-traditional spaces.