 | Gail A. Melkus |
Gail A. Melkus, the newly designated Independence Foundation Professor of Nursing, has devoted her career to caring for persons with Type 2 diabetes and educating others to do the same.
At Yale, she developed a program of study at the School of Nursing called the Diabetes Concentration, which provides clinical and research-based experience for master's degree students across all specialty areas. This was the first program of this type in the United States.
Her research is aimed at helping persons with diabetes, particularly women of color, to participate in their own self-management of the disease. She has implemented intervention studies aimed at improving control and decreasing the complications associated with Type 2 diabetes in culturally diverse and underserved populations.
Melkus has published extensively in the area of diabetes care, specifically on culturally sensitive interventions. She is now funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute of Nursing Research to test an intervention aimed at improving the care provided to community-based African-American women by supporting their efforts at self-management.
Melkus also serves as associate director of the Center for Excellence in Chronic Illness Care and associate director of scholarship in the Office of Scholarly Affairs. Most recently, she assumed the role of director of the Pilot Development Core in the federally funded Yale-Howard Exploratory Center to Eliminate Health Disparities. Her responsibilities include working with young investigators to develop successful pilot studies to be funded by the center.
For her work, Melkus was awarded the Connecticut Nurses' Association's Diamond Jubilee Virginia Henderson Excellence in Nursing Research Award in 2003. That same year, she was elected a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing.
Melkus earned her undergraduate degree in nursing from the University of Bridgeport and a master's degree in community health/education from Southern Connecticut State University. She studied at the Yale School of Public Health as a special student while working toward her doctorate at Columbia University Teachers College, Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. She completed postgraduate courses at Pace University and at Yale.
Before joining the Yale faculty in 1986, Melkus was a nurse educator and diabetes nurse specialist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine's Diabetes Research and Training Center. She previously was a diabetes nurse specialist in the Bronx Veteran's Administration Hospital; director of patient education and a diabetes nurse educator at St. Joseph's Hospital and Health Center; and an operating room staff nurse and clinical instructor at Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Melkus has authored or co-authored numerous scientific articles and several book chapters. She serves as an adviser or consultant to a number of organizations, hospital programs and medical centers.
T H I S
Gail Melkus is Independence Foundation Professor of Nursing
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