#MeetUsMonday – Meet Professor, Nurse Scientist, and Pediatric NP Jessica Keim-Malpass
Meet Jess.
Weightlifter. Introvert. Caffeine fanatic and early lunch eater. Mom, widow, and niece and granddaughter of nurses. Pediatric nurse practitioner and an NIH-funded nurse scientist who uses big data and continuous monitoring to create on-unit visual warning systems to predict ICU patients’ decompensation. Studies vaccine hesitancy, young cancer patients’ social media communities, and supports for children with medical complexity and those who care for them. Writer, poet, and a professor and mentor to PhD in nursing students who’s teaching an NP assessment lab to DNP students in fall 2025. The Malvina Yuille Boyd Professor of Oncology Nursing.
HER PATH TO NURSING
“I knew growing up that I was interested in science, but I was also really interested in policy and math, too. My original intent was to become a doctor. I took the MCAT, and during a gap year before medical school, spent a lot of time with physicians and nurses to figure out where I was going. It was critical for me to see the bigger picture, and choosing nursing was one of the better decisions I made.
"What we say to one another can be so impactful; you don’t know the influence you might have on someone . . . I try to compliment students all the time. It’s made me really aware of wanting to recognize when people make significant improvements."
“It was intuition, though: not part of the plan. I rely on inner wisdom . . . I appreciate that about myself. And once I make a decision, I don’t second-guess it. I have many faults, but that’s not one.
“So, I got into nursing later in my career through the CNL program, and it was after that, and after spending time with nurses and nurse practitioners, that my clinical work and research focus areas really fell into place. I was lucky to find my passion in pediatrics and pediatric oncology, and my time in the pediatric ICU, which cemented my interests. I knew from my undergraduate work (I was a biology major at Wake Forest University) that I wanted to be a scientist . . . but it wasn’t until the CNL program that I figured out how I could put the two together.”
RESEARCH INTERESTS
“My dad being an engineer meant he approached problems in a distinct way. I learned a lot from that. It made me love working with engineers and scientists. In fact, my first job was as an administrative assistant at a cement company . . . I now see a lot of parallels between engineers and nurses. We’re applied; we want to fix problems.
“I started studying cancer blogs in the mid-2000s, and, in particular, those connected to the ‘Stupid Cancer’ blog, a large online community that existed in the heyday of longform blogs. It’s my favorite work to date, and one of the most influential that gave me insight into experiences in a massively different way. To be honest, in terms of being on the other side of it with Charlie [Keim-Malpass’s late husband, who suddenly died of cancer in 2023], it gave me a glimpse and an understanding of how to approach those spaces as a caregiver. After Charlie died suddenly, my dad passed away. It was a double whammy, a different kind of loss, and being my dad’s secondary caregiver gave me a new appreciation for aging and end of life and the intersection with Alzheimer’s.
“I think a lot about timing, and how I stumbled into some of these things, and parts of it almost seem guided, to be honest.”
ON WRITING
“I wouldn’t call myself a writer as a young person, not creatively. I really enjoyed writing for history and policy classes, but it wasn’t until I got to college, and someone gave me the compliment that I was a strong writer that I really considered myself to even be a writer. I still think about that compliment all the time, and how the stories we tell about ourselves shape how we view our ability to contribute in our jobs, as academics. That comment gave me a different kind of confidence going forward, and as an educator. What we say to one another can be so impactful; you don’t know the influence you might have on someone.
“This intersects with my work with students: I try to compliment students all the time. It’s made me really aware of wanting to recognize when people make significant improvements.
“Writing is one of my favorite things, but it’s also something that doesn’t come perfectly or easily to me. I’m influenced by memoirs, like On Writing, by Stephen King, and love thinking about how to be a better writer. The McDonald’s poem I just wrote (for the fall 2025 VNL), I’d been sitting on that for a long, long time, and it took me about ten minutes once I started writing. My process is really in the rumination. When I’m ready, I write it.
"It’s striking, with PhD students, you work with them for many years and see them develop confidence and a sense of themselves as scientists. You give them what they need and then get out of their way and watch them grow."
“People who read my writing sometimes write to thank me for just bringing a different lens to the experience. There are a lot of people who’ve made writing a way to feel less isolated . . . a way to work through complex feelings. Writing can make hard things feel more like a common experience, if you’re brave enough to get what you’ve written out there, if you’ve turned your thoughts into something.”
BEST PART OF HER JOB
“Watching my students grow right in front of me . . . it’s striking, with PhD students, you work with them for many years and see them develop confidence and a sense of themselves as scientists. You give them what they need and then get out of their way and watch them grow. I get more joy out of their successes than my own, really. I also like learning beside them. It’s fun.
“I see both pediatric hematology and oncology patients each week Thursday, which is the single most grounding thing I do. I love the complexity of how different each day is. People think it’s just sad all the time, but what I see is that there’s so much joy, even during the sad times. All of that intersects with my own journey through grief, suffering, and sadness that can happen simultaneously with happiness. It takes a large space to hold that alongside people. The patients and the families are amazing . . . they really just inspire everything.”
UVA SCHOOL OF NURSING IN A WORD?
“FRIENDSHIP. I feel very lucky to have known a lot of these people for a long time. Some of my colleagues I’ve known since I was in nursing school, close to 20 years, and they’ve seen many different seasons of me. That’s important. Going through the hardest days of my life, they’ve been there with me. The day Charlie died, for example, Jeanne Alhusen (associate dean for nursing research and UVA Medical Center Professor of Nursing) was at the hospital with me. So was (professor) Beth Epstein.
"You can’t replicate stuff like that. I feel lucky that I get to work with friends.”
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Goal 3 - Position the School as a leader in nursing science, from discovery to translation
The School’s researchers seek to address some of the most pressing health inequities of our time by leading groundbreaking investigations, disseminating findings in ways that impact our local and global communities, and by recruiting and supporting nurse scientists at all career stages. The benefits of nursing science engage all our faculty and learners, supporting diverse scholarly and dissemination efforts. Our undergraduate and graduate curricula require students to engage in research and other scholarly endeavors and by offering opportunities for them to collaborate with mentors and peers to disseminate their work.