MEET THE THEORIST

Cornelia Ruland received her Ph.D. in nursing in 1998 from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Medical Informatics at Columbia University in New York, in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire, and in the College of Nursing at University of Iowa in Iowa City. She is also the Director of the Center for Shared Decision Making and Nursing Research at Rikshospitalet National Hospital in Oslo, Norway (Columbia University, 2013).

Ruland’s research interests are patient preferences and shared decision making, decision support system (DSS) to support preference- and evidence-based patient care, consumer health informatics, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, DSS for nursing resource management, web-based education, and issues in knowledge presentation (Columbia University, 2013).

She has authored and co-authored several papers and published her own book entitled Introduction to Nursing and Medical Informatics in 2000. Her papers were recognized in the American Medical Informatics Association Fall Symposia in 1998 and in 2000 on application of medical informatics in healthcare or biomedical research. In 2000, she received the Sigma Theta Tau International’s Education Technology Award, along with Drs. Delaney, Ehnfors, and Thoroddsen, for an “international collaboration on the first Web-based Scandinavian Master-Course in Nursing Informatics (Columbia University, 2013).”

Shirley Moore is an Associate Dean for Research and Professor in the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University, where she also finished her MS in 1991 and Ph.D in nursing in 1993. She received her BS in nursing from Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Her educational interests are epistemology and theory in nursing, interdisciplinary team models of care, and continuous quality improvement. She also heads the Frances Payne Bolton’s Center for Research and Scholarship as well as the Center for Excellence for Self-Management Advancement Through Research and Translation (SMART). She had previous leadership roles in professional organizations such as the American Heart Association and Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing (France Payne Bolton, 2013).

She has published several researches as a principal investigator and as a co-investigator. Her research interests are on the recovery following cardiac events, health behavior change, exercise following cardiac events, obesity, and quality and safety (France Payne Bolton, 2013).

Nurse theorists Joyce Fitzpatrick, Jean Johnson, and Elizabeth Lenz influenced her to develop her own theory. According to Moore, one of the important skills of a doctoral student is theory construction (Alligood, 2014).

References:

Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University (2013). Cornelia M. Ruland profile. Retrieved from http://people.dbmi.columbia.edu/~cmr7001/

Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, Case Western Reserve University (2013). Shirley M. Mooreprofile. Retrieved from http://fpb.case.edu/faculty/moore.shtm