08/30/2024

ACHNE Member Spotlight: Mary Ellen LaSala

Mary Ellen LaSala is currently a clinical associate professor at Stony Brook University as well as a Director of Special Projects. She completed her BSN at Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing in NY City and her Masters at Wagner College in New York. Her PhD is from Adelphi University. She joined ACHNE in 2014 when she started her position at Stony Brook and was assigned to teach population health, although she incorporated a community perspective in previous teaching assignments, including in an ADN program. A mentor told her that she needed to join ACHNE for the “wealth of information” made available. She found ACHNE to be a unique platform for collaboration with others who are dedicated to excellence in teaching, practice, and research. Mary Ellen’s first elected position in ACHNE was as a member of the Nominating Committee, which she then co-chaired. She is now the Northern MAL and serves on the planning committee for the AI. She is eager to contribute her enthusiasm and expertise to ACHNE’s mission of advancing health equity and improving the well-being of communities, both locally and globally.

Mary Ellen is passionate about advocacy and ethics. She worked to include legal guidance and advocacy work in the nursing curriculum at Stony Brook and continues to develop that content so that it builds across the entire program. Her dissertation explored the lived experience of teenage mothers in a group home setting. She previously ran a program with a catholic agency serving 10-15 mothers, covering prenatal and post-natal care as well as infant growth and development. Other research includes providing social support and legal guidance to adults with chronic illness or dementia. Mary Ellen has a certificate in bioethics and serves on the ethics committee at her clinical position at a local health center as well as teaching ethics to both the undergraduate students at Stony Brook University and practicing nurses.

In addition to advocacy, Mary Ellen also researches students’ preparedness for the science courses included in a BSN program. She is currently collecting data to determine if a required class before starting the nursing program at Hofstra University helps students be successful.

Mary Ellen would like to encourage ACHNE members to attend the “wonderful” AIs. She finds the AI full of great information, as well as fun! At the most recent AI, she enjoyed hearing about climate change and what we need to do as nurses. She feels that ACHNE helps continue evidence-based practice work and helps disseminate information to anyone interested in community/public health, as well as other nurses (because every nurse will be involved with public health at some point in their career).