Biography

Virginia "Ginny" Hart is a board-certified psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner who teaches undergraduate and graduate nursing students mental health nursing and specialty advanced practice psychiatric mental health nursing courses.

With certifications in crisis prevention and intervention, suicide prevention, and a certified clinical trauma professional, she also earned certification from ODU's Center for Telehealth Innovation, Education, and Research. With professors Richard Westphal and Peggy Plews-Ogan, she is part of the $2.14M Wisdom and Well-Being HRSA grant earned in early 2022 that is creating programming to support resilience in the healthcare workforce, a project very much in sync with her scholarly focus.

Prior to her appointment at UVA, Hart was the psychiatric-mental health program coordinator and an assistant professor at Radford University, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, and worked as a psych-mental health nurse practitioner in the department of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at Carilion Clinic, at Lewis-Gale Physicians LLC psychiatry, and Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center at Harding Hospital.

A neonatal nurse early in her career, she is an award-winning professor and scholar, having twice earned the Tyson Innovative Teaching Award at UVA School of Nursing, the DAISY Award for Extraordinary Faculty while at Radford, and the Sandra Edwardson Award for Excellence in Doctor of Nursing Practice Leadership from UMN.

Hart earned a BSN from Vanderbilt, an MSN from the University of Pennsylvania in perinatal nursing, and a post-master's certificate in psychiatric mental health nursing from Ohio State University. Hart earned a DNP from the University of Minnesota, and, as part of her doctoral degree, completed a scholarly project titled, "Evidence based integrative stress reduction and wellness promotion program for nursing students."