Two New Faculty On Tap
Two new faculty have joined the School of Nursing: Dr. Kimberly Acquaviva, the Betty Norman Norris Professor of Nursing, and Dr. Malinda Lee Whitlow, associate professor of nursing. Drs. Acquaviva and Whitlow both begin August 1.
Kimberly Acquaviva, PhD, MSW, CWE
Kim Acquaviva comes to UVA from the George Washington University School of Nursing where she was a tenured professor and served in a number of roles, including director of the National Collaborative on Aging and associate dean for faculty affairs.
Early in her career, Acquaviva – a social worker and scholar – cared for patients and families facing life-limiting illness in hospitals and hospice settings, work that ultimately shaped her research interest in LGBTQ aging and end-of-life issues. She is also well-versed in other healthcare domains, including high-tech approaches to boosting clinicians’ emergency preparedness. While at GW, she played key roles on interdisciplinary teams that have secured millions of dollars of external funding. One of these projects, the National Nurse Emergency Preparedness Initiative, received $2 million in funding from the Department of Homeland Security and resulted in an online course that more than 50,000 nurses have completed to date.
In the classroom, Acquaviva teaches topics that touch both nursing and medicine, including population health, evidence-based practice, grant writing, health policy, and research project proposal courses – as well as offering guest lectures on academic dishonesty and how to take a sexual history. At UVA this fall, she’ll teach health policy and grant writing to a mix of undergraduate and graduate students, and she’ll work closely with our Center for Interprofessional Collaboration (formerly known as the Center for ASPIRE) to support its grant-writing, advance its work and goals, champion IPE beyond UVA’s boundaries and engage in its twice-annual T3 Faculty Development Program as a teacher, facilitator and participant.
A Fulbright Scholar, an award-winning educator, a much-feted LGBTQ advocate, and an often-tapped national leader and scholar, Acquaviva was drawn to UVA in large part because of its healthy work environment and inclusivity initiatives. Her “em dash podcast” is also a must-listen: from episodes featuring LGBTQ individuals sharing their experiences navigating the healthcare system to episodes in which persons with disabilities talk about reclaiming their space, the podcast amplifies a wonderful variety of voices that are not often heard – and should be.
An often-published scholar in the academic and lay media alike, Acquaviva is the author of LGBTQ-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care: A Practical Guide to Transforming Professional Practice (Columbia University Press: 2017), which received the American Journal of Nursing’s Book of the Year Award in the Palliative Care and Hospice category. Currently, she’s working on a book about her experiences caring for her wife, a fellow hospice and palliative care expert, as her family navigates the healthcare system and the dying process.
Acquaviva earned a BA in sociology, a master’s in social work, and a PhD in human sexuality education from the University of Pennsylvania, and is an AASECT-certified sexuality educator.
Malinda Lee Whitlow, DNP, FNP-BC, RN
Malinda Whitlow - a triple `Hoo (having earned a DNP, MSN and BSN at UVA, and a current member of the Raven Society and Beta Kappa), - arrives Aug. 1 and will teach both BSN and RN to BSN students starting this fall.
Whitlow, too, comes to UVA from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where, for nearly six years, she’s been an assistant professor and directed the nursing school’s Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing (ABSN) program for the last four.
At GW, Whitlow's teaching and mentoring roles were expansive: she taught both medical-surgical and community health courses, labs and clinicals, as well as pharmacology and health assessment classes. She oversaw undergraduates’ clinical care at inpatient, long-term care and community sites, mentored students completing capstone projects, and led clinical trips to global sites in both Haiti and Ecuador.
In her academic career, Whitlow has been an administrative leader, too. As ABSN program director and interim assistant dean of the nursing school’s undergraduate division, she developed programs and led revisions of curricula, participated in budget planning, program assessment, and launched and oversaw new student tutoring and mentorship programs. As a faculty member, she was repeatedly tapped to serve on a variety of university and nursing committees, including ones related to interprofessional education, research, healthy work environments, diversity, and faculty workload.
Currently a family nurse practitioner at UVA Health System’s Employee Health Same Day Clinic, Whitlow earned GW Nursing’s Excellence in Undergraduate Mentoring and Advising award in 2017, its Excellence in Student Life Award in 2015, and was a Sigma Nursing Faculty Leadership Academy Scholar from 2016-17. In 2015, she was also named one of the Virginia Nurse Association's “40 Under 40” awardees, was a UVA Health System Magnet Champion (2004-2011), and winner of UVA’s Preceptor of the Year (2005).
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