Gloria J. McNeal: UMDNJ

Gloria J. McNeal, Ph.D., A.C.N.S.-B.C., A.P.N., F.A.A.N., goes the distance to treat patients and teach students. With over $2.5 million in extramural grant awards, McNeal designed and implemented an interdisciplinary, nurse-faculty managed mobile primary care clinic that has logged more than 38,000 miles and treated more than 2,000 underserved patients free-of-charge in Newark and other cities around the state. The clinic—the only one of its kind in the state—serves as a practice site for nursing and medical students and faculty.   

The mobile unit—modeled after similar vans she ran in Pennsylvania earlier in her career, and much like the medical hospital on wheels in the television show M.A.S.H.—is one of the many ways McNeal has found to combine service in the classroom with service in the community. “I’ve always liked combining education and clinical practice,” she says. “This is the best of both worlds.”

McNeal’s interest in nursing and teaching dates back decades; the daughter of a nurse, McNeal admired her mother but also discovered that she had an ability to simplify complex subject matter when tutoring her peers in college. While earning a bachelor’s degree in nursing at Villanova University she enrolled in the NROTC Program, and was commissioned an officer in the US Navy Nurse Corps. Following graduation she was assigned to critical care. But she was soon drawn back to academia; after retiring from the military, she earned a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specialized in both clinical care and education. She was later appointed to a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was mentored by the internationally renowned and legendary nurse leader Claire M. Fagin, R.N., Ph.D., F.A.A.N., FRCN.

Fagin encouraged McNeal to pursue a doctorate, a credential Fagin said she would need to advance in her profession. “She helped me understand that if I was going to be a leader in academe, I had to be published, I had to be grant-funded, and I had to engage in research,” McNeal recalls.  That proved to be good advice. Since earning her doctorate, McNeal has steadily climbed the academic career ladder, conducting groundbreaking research projects along the way.  An author of over 100 publications, an awardee of nearly $6 million in grants, a recipient of over 25 teaching excellence awards, and a fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Nursing, she is close to realizing her highest professional goal: a nursing school deanship.

For her doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, McNeal compared the scholarly productivity of African American nurse faculty teaching at predominantly white and historically black colleges and universities. She found that African American nurse faculty members were more productive at predominantly white institutions because they had greater access to resources such as on-site statisticians and advanced teleconferencing capabilities. As a leader in the transitioning of critical care nursing practice beyond the traditional walls of the ICU, she was among the first to study the utilization of telehealth technology in the remote monitoring and electronic transmission of ambulatory electrocardiographic data captured in the home setting.   Now an associate dean and a professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, she plans to take a closer look at using telehealth monitoring to screen for vision threatening disorders in pediatric populations.

Looking back, McNeal is glad she followed Dr. Fagin’s advice, and hopes other nurses will too—especially as the country faces a looming nursing shortage that will only be solved if more nurses become teachers. “This is a clarion call to advanced practice nurses or doctorally-prepared nurses who might not have considered nursing education in the past,” she says. “Marrying nursing practice with classroom instruction and theoretical constructs is a very rewarding experience.”