The Power of ‘We’

As dean of the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Linda McCauley 79MN, PhD, RN, FAAN, FRCN, occasionally shared about her experiences playing high school basketball in High Point, N.C.

Her team didn’t just play basketball, though. They were North Carolina state champions for three consecutive years, and McCauley fondly recalled the lessons learned and confidence instilled during that formative time.

But what no one ever heard in her recounting was her position on the team, whether she was a starter, or how many points she scored. Her message was always about the accomplishments of the team and their pursuit of excellence.

As McCauley concludes her 16-year tenure as dean at the end of December, her recollection is the same: The school has reached championship levels — earning national No. 1 rankings for its master’s and bachelor’s nursing programs and experiencing meteoric growth in enrollment, research and more. But she insists: It has been a team achievement, not hers alone.

“Being a dean is not about you,” she says. “It’s about how the school performs under your leadership — about working together to improve the profession and make things better.”

When McCauley became dean in 2009, the school’s master’s degree program was ranked No. 26 nationwide. The school was small, approximately 475 students, and faced other challenges — including a wave of faculty retirements and a limited pipeline of younger scholars — that posed a daunting educational landscape.

However, McCauley met those challenges with something more substantial — a profound respect and appreciation for the school and its people, informed by her time as a graduate student 30 years earlier.

The Path to Emory

After graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and working in clinical practice, McCauley came to Emory in 1978 to pursue a Master of Nursing degree, which was then a year-long post-licensure program.

“It was a transformative year,” she recalls. "I loved every single course I took, and the faculty were just amazing. I knew when I finished that year that I wasn't finished. Twelve months wasn’t long enough, and I wanted to learn more.”

From there, she pursued a PhD in environmental health and epidemiology and became a tenured professor at the University of Cincinnati. She then spent 10 years outside nursing as an occupational and environmental scientist and professor at Oregon Health Sciences University.

At that point, she came to a crossroads of whether to stay on that trajectory or return to nursing. She asked herself: “Do I have something to give back to the profession? Do I have something to say?”

Deciding that she had something to give, McCauley applied to become the associate dean for research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. For the next five years, she worked at Penn, building her leadership skills, research portfolio, and administrative experience. Then came the opportunity at Emory.

The First Priority

If you described McCauley’s tenure at Emory as a movie production, her first task was assembling a cast. During her early years, she spent 90% of her time building the faculty — retaining the existing faculty and hiring the best minds to join them.

“I went after talent wherever it was, because if you don’t have stellar faculty, the ones everyone else wants, you don’t have a top school,” she says.

McCauley says it was an easy sell once prospective faculty saw the resources available to them — including the proximity to Emory’s public health and medical schools, Woodruff Health Sciences Center, and Emory Healthcare, as well as Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Joseph Maxwell Cleland Atlanta VA Medical Center, Grady Health, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Once you come here, you realize it is a gourmet kitchen and you can cook whatever you want,” she says. “You just need people who know how to cook.”

The national recognition earned by faculty during McCauley’s tenure is a testament to her recruiting prowess. The number of faculty earning prominent nursing fellowships increased significantly: American Academy of Nursing Fellows grew from 8 to 54, American Association of Nurse Practitioners Fellows went from 1 to 17, and National League for Nursing Academy of Nursing Education Fellows increased from 1 to 3. In 2022, the Friends of the National Institute of Nursing Research honored Emory faculty members with four out of five of its annual awards.

A Great Partnership

With a core group of faculty in place, the dean and her team became laser-focused on another priority: building an academic-practice partnership with Emory Healthcare. Their collaboration began during the 2014 Ebola crisis, when the two organizations worked side by side to create education and safety protocols. Two years later, Sharon Pappas, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN, came on board as Emory Healthcare’s Chief Nurse Executive. Under her leadership and McCauley’s, the two entities began to be “joined at the hip,” McCauley says. 

They collaborated to develop initiatives such as the Emory Nursing Experience, a nationwide, in-person and online professional development program; InEmory, an MN program that incorporates Emory Healthcare clinical experiences and job opportunities; and Emory Integrated Memory Care, a nurse-led primary care clinic for patients with dementia.

The entities also strengthened their clinical placement partnership, a development McCauley says benefits students and the patients they serve.

“In academic health systems, our students are learning to care for patients,” she says. “But they are also seeing — with clinical trials, for example — what the future treatments will be. Students learn to take care of today’s patients and begin to see where care is going.”

Ingenuity and Expansion

As McCauley entered her 10th year as dean, the school had already doubled in size, but the success created an inevitable challenge: space.

The simulation space in the school’s 1520 Clifton Road location was insufficient, so the school leased space at three locations. Classrooms were bursting at the seams with students, and McCauley and her team had to find a solution.

When schools or colleges need a new building, they typically need two things: demonstrated growth and a substantial donation. The School of Nursing had the former, but not the latter.

“We had to challenge the model,” McCauley says.

And challenge they did. They exercised fiscal prudence and built the school’s reserves. They also became de facto real estate experts, guided by colleagues in the industry. After realizing that options on campus weren’t possible, they explored purchasing and leasing options around Atlanta — eventually landing on 250 East Ponce de Leon Ave., a downtown Decatur office building three miles from the Emory campus.

With ingenuity and hard work, the Emory Nursing Learning Center opened three years later, in 2022. The $20.6 million, 70,000-square-foot center features cutting-edge simulation and instructional spaces and is home to the Emory Nursing Experience professional development program. Since opening, the center has expanded its footprint, adding 10,000 square feet for testing space and the Master in Cardiovascular Perfusion Science program.

“The Emory Nursing Learning Center was a dream that I had,” McCauley says. “As we were meeting the challenge of producing more nursing graduates, we had a distinct need to create what the next generation of nursing students will need to learn effectively. That’s what this center has done.”

Research Excellence

While leading the school, McCauley never wavered from her commitment to nursing science. Spurred by her doctoral project, which showed the health risks for nurses handling chemotherapy drugs, her scholarship lies at the intersection of nursing and environmental and occupational health sciences.

“I got back the results from my first study, and I thought, ‘That’s pretty cool,’” she says. “From that moment on, I was totally hooked.”

A pioneer in nursing research, she has focused on environmental health issues such as pesticide exposure and heat-related risks for vulnerable populations, particularly children and farmworkers. Since 1985, she has maintained continuous research funding totaling more than $58 million, authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications, and brought critical environmental issues to the public eye.

Under McCauley’s leadership, the school has intentionally hired faculty with robust research portfolios, supported their pursuits, and organized the research enterprise into hubs focused on specific areas of interest, including aging studies/caregiving, AI/data science, violence/injuring prevention and treatment, natural disaster and environmental science, oncology, pediatrics, women’s health, and cardiovascular, brain and biomarkers. Among those she recruited was her own PhD advisor and mentor, Vicki Hertzberg, PhD, FASA, a renowned professor and researcher on big data and health care.

Unsurprisingly, the school has climbed from No. 38 to No. 3 among nursing schools in National Institutes of Health funding. It has been ranked in the top five for 10 consecutive years. Over the past 15 years, the school has received over $121 million in NIH funding.

 “The pure weight of the science in this school is incredible,” she says.