Nursing dean to return to West Coast home

The Hell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing Building (see in the background) will be Dean Marla Salmon's home through June. That's when after nine years at Emory, Salmon will depart to take over as dean of the University of Washington School of Nursing.

Marla Salmon, who during the last nine years has guided the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing into the top tier of U.S. schools of nursing, has accepted the deanship at the University of Washington (UW) School of Nursing in Seattle. She also will be professor of global health in the UW schools of medicine and public health.  

Salmon will continue to serve as dean of nursing at Emory through June 2008, and at that time an interim dean will be appointed. She will start her new position in fall 2008.

This transition fulfills Salmon’s personal dream of returning to the West Coast. She grew up in northern California and earned bachelor’s degrees in political science and nursing from the University of Portland in Oregon before moving East. She earned her doctorate from Johns Hopkins.

“I have had the pleasure of working with Marla Salmon for only a short time, but have come to appreciate her leadership skills and deep commitment to improving health care, especially for those most vulnerable in our society,” said Fred Sanfilippo, executive vice president for health affairs and CEO of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center. “Not surprisingly, her talents are widely known and sought after by others.”

Working with leadership at the nursing school, Salmon has significantly improved its national ranking in research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), taking the school into the top 20 of more than 700 U.S. collegiate schools of nursing and the top 10 among private institutions. In addition, she has tripled competitive external funding and boosted the school’s global and national recognition as a center of excellence in scholarship, leadership, and social responsibility. 

“Marla Salmon plays a significant role as an academic leader at Emory, a role that goes beyond her tenure as the dean of the School of Nursing,” said Provost Earl Lewis. “She is as interested in undergraduate affairs as she is graduate studies, the social sciences, and the arts as she is the basic sciences. Blessed with a fertile intellect, Marla loves to identify and wrestle with big problems, the kinds of problems whose solutions offer the greatest return to society.”

Salmon is founding director of the school’s Lillian Carter Center for International Nursing, and holds a joint appointment in the Rollins School of Public Health as a professor of health policy and management.

“Dr. Salmon is an international leader in health care,” said President Jim Wagner. “While at Emory, she has contributed tremendously to the quality of the nursing workforce worldwide, particularly in addressing nursing shortages in developing countries. At the same time, she also made serving those most needy in the local community a priority for Emory’s nursing students and faculty. We will miss her and wish her well as she takes the helm of one of the highest ranked nursing schools in the U.S.”

Recently, under Salmon’s leadership, the school was one of only 15 schools of nursing around the nation to be tapped by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to develop quality and safety education curricula as part of a new model for nursing education.

During Salmon’s tenure, the nursing school graduated its first PhD student, launched the federally funded Center for Research on Symptoms, Symptom Interactions and Health Outcomes, created the first simulation training laboratory on the Emory campus, and hosted three global conferences that convened top government nursing and physician leaders from around the world.

In her new role, Salmon said she hopes to create opportunities for collaboration between both Emory and UW in areas of international nursing and interdisciplinary healthcare systems, technology, and settings improvement.—Ashante Dobbs